Women in Australia.
In Australia we have a family of the human race still more uneducated, though not more barbarous, than that which inhabits the woods of the African continent. There is among them less approach to the arts of civilization, less ingenuity, less intelligence, but there is more simplicity. Their customs are not so brutal as those prevailing on the banks of the Joliba or the Senegal. Nevertheless they are true savages, and the condition of their women is consistent with all the other features of their irreclaimed state. Of the Australians, however, as of all races imperfectly known, there obtains in this country a vulgar idea drawn from the old accounts, which are little better than caricatures. They have been represented as a hideous race, scarcely elevated above the brute, blood-thirsty, destitute of human feeling, without any redeeming characteristics, and, moreover, incapable of civilization. Such a description is calculated only to mislead. The aborigines of Australia are certainly a low, barbarous, and even a brutal race, but the true picture of their manners, which form the expression of their character, is not without encouraging traits.
Considering the great extent of New Holland, it is surprising to find such an uniformity of character and customs, as we actually discover among its nations. The language, varied by dialects, the habits, social laws, and ideas of the people, are extremely similar, whether we visit them in that province called the Happy or in the districts around Port Essington. Consequently, though it occupy a large space on the map, this region will not require any very extended notice. An idea of the condition and morality of its women may be afforded by one general view, with reference to the various local peculiarities noticed by travellers.
The native inhabitants of Australia are generally nomadic. They dwell in temporary villages scattered over vast surfaces of country, and move from place to place, as the supply of provisions, spontaneously provided by the earth, is more or less abundant. Separated as they are into small isolated communities—rarely numbering more than eighty members—they resort to the borders of lakes and streams, which dry up at certain seasons, and force them to seek elsewhere a home. A rude copy of the patriarchal form of government prevails among them—old men being the rulers of the tribe.
The condition of women among these primitive savages is extremely low. They are servants of the stronger sex. In some of their dialects wife and slave are synonymous. All the labour devolves on her, and, as no form of agriculture is practised, this consists principally in the search for the means of life. She collects the daily food, she prepares the camp or the hut at night, she piles fire-wood, draws water, weaves baskets, carries all burdens, and bears the children on her back, and the return for all this willing devotion is frequently the grossest ill-usage.
There is no form of marriage ceremony observed. A man gets a wife in various ways. Sometimes she is betrothed to him while an infant—even before her birth, and sometimes she devolves to him with other property. The eldest surviving brother, or next male relative, inherits the women of a whole family. Thus many households are supplied. Others steal their wives from hostile tribes, and frequent wars arise from such proceedings. Polygamy is universally allowed, but not by any means generally practised; for there are few parts of Australia where the female sex is not outnumbered by the male. Plurality of wives consequently implies wealth and distinction—each additional one being regarded as a new slave, an increase of property. Nor are the women jealous of polygamy. When a man has many wives, they subdivide the labour, which otherwise would devolve on one, thus lightening each others’ burdens, and procuring companionship. There can indeed be little jealous feeling where affection on the part of the husband to the wife is almost a thing unknown.
The Australian wife when past the prime of life is usually a wretched object. She is often deformed and crippled by excessive toil—her body bent, her legs crooked, her ankles swollen, her face wearing an aspect of sullen apathy, produced by long hardship. When young, however, they are frequently lively and happy, not being cursed with keen feelings, and caring for little beyond the present hour. Should a young woman, nevertheless, be distinguished by peculiar beauty, she leads, while her attractions last, a miserable course of existence. Betrothed at an early age, she is perpetually watched by the future husband, and upon the least suspicion of infidelity is subjected to the most brutal treatment. To thrust a spear through her thigh or the calf of her leg is the common mode of punishment. She may, in spite of all precautions, be snatched away: whether consenting or not, she must endure the same penalty. If she be chaste, the man who has attempted to seduce her may strike her with a club, stun her, and bear her to a wood, where she is violated by force. Still she is punished, and it is, says Sir George Grey, no common sight to see a woman of superior elegance or beauty who has not some scars disfiguring various parts of her person. This period, however, is soon over, for the bloom of an Australian woman is very short-lived. When the seducer is found, he is punished in a similar manner, and if he have committed adultery with a married woman, suffers death.
The jealousy of the married men is excessive, and would be ridiculous were it not that their vigilance is absolutely called for. A careless husband would speedily suffer for his neglect. Accordingly we find the Australian savages practising in their woods or open plains restrictions not dissimilar to those adopted in the seraglios of the East. When an encampment is formed for the night every man overlooks his wives while they build one or more temporary huts, over which he then places himself as a guard. The young children and the unmarried girls occupy this portion of the village. Boys above ten years of age and all single men are forced to sleep in a separate encampment, constructed for them by their mothers, and are not allowed to visit the bivouacs of the married men. Under no circumstances is a strange native allowed to approach one of the family huts. Each of these little dwellings is placed far from the rest, so that when their inmates desire to hold converse they sing to each other from a distance. When the young men collect to dance, the maidens and wives are allowed to be spectators, but only on a few occasions to join. They have dances of their own, at which the youth of the other sex are not permitted to be present.
In spite of this excessive jealousy the idea of a husband’s affection for his wife appears strange to them. Men return from journeys without exchanging a greeting with the mothers of their children, but those children they salute with many endearing terms, falling on their necks and shedding tears with every demonstration of love. A man has been known, when his wife was grievously sick, to leave her to die in the wilderness, rather than be troubled with her on his journey.
Yet the influence of women is not by any means small. In some of the tribes they obtain a position of moderate equality with the husband, are well-fed, clothed, and treated as rational beings. Everywhere the men, young and old, strive to deserve their praise; and exhibitions of vanity take place, perfectly ludicrous to those European travellers who forget that the silly dandyism of the Australian savage, with his paint and opossum skin, is only peculiar in its form of expression. Women are often present on the field of battle, to inspire their husbands by exhortations, to rouse them by clamours of revenge or appeals to their valour; and among the chief punishments of cowardice is their contempt. The man failing in any great duty of a warrior is so disgraced. Thus, if he neglect to avenge the death of his nearest relation, his wives may quit him; the unmarried girls shun him with scorn, and he is driven by their reproaches to perform his bloody and dangerous task.
Where polygamy exists it is seldom the woman’s consent is required before her union with a suitor. In Australia it is never required or expected. The transaction is entirely between her father and the man who desires her for a wife, or, rather, for a concubine. She is ordered, perhaps, to take up her household bag, and go to a certain man’s hut, and this may be the first notice she has of the marriage. There she is in the position of a slave to her master. If she be obedient, toil without torture is her mitigated lot; but if she rebel, the club is employed to enforce submission. She is her husband’s absolute property. He may give her away, exchange her, or lend her as he pleases. Indeed, old men will sometimes offer their wives to friends, or as a mark of respect to strangers; and the offer is not uncommonly accepted.
Though we have mentioned three ways of obtaining a wife, the system of betrothal is the most general. Almost every female child is so disposed of a few days after its birth. From that moment the parents have no control whatever over her future settlement; she is in fact a bought slave. Should her betrothed die she becomes the property of his heir. Whatever her age she may be taken into the hut; cohabitation often commencing while the girl is not twelve years old, and her husband only a boy. Three days after her first husband’s death the widow goes to the hut of the second.
Some restrictions, however, are imposed on the intercourse of the sexes. Thus all children take the family name of their mother, and a man may not marry a woman of his own family name. Relations nearer than cousins are not allowed to marry, and an alliance even within this degree is very rare. The Australians have, indeed, a horror of all connections with the least stigma of incest upon them, and adjudge the punishment of death to such an offence. Their laws, which are matters not of enactment but of custom, are extremely severe upon this and all other points connected with their women.
Chastity, nevertheless, is neither highly appreciated nor often practised. It is far from being prized by the women as a jewel of value; on the contrary, they plot for opportunities to yield it illicitly, and can scarcely be said to know the idea. Profligacy is all but universal among them; it is a characteristic even of the children. When some schools were formed at Perth, for the education of the natives, it was found absolutely necessary to separate children of tender years, in order to prevent scenes of vile debauch from being enacted. It should be said, however, that though indiscriminate prostitution among the women, and depraved sensuality among the men, exist in the most savage communities, disease and vice are far less characteristic of them than of those tribes which have come in contact with Europeans. In all the colonial towns there is a class of native women following the calling of prostitutes, and there the venereal disease and syphilis are most deadly and widely prevalent. The former appears to have been brought from Europe, and makes terrible havoc among them. The latter, ascribed by their traditions to the East, has been found among tribes which had apparently never held intercourse with the whites; in such cases, however, it is in a milder form.
Several causes contribute to the corruption of manners among these savage tribes. One of the principal is, the monopoly of women claimed by the old men. The patriarchs of the tribe, contrive to secure all the young girls, leaving to their more youthful brethren only common prostitutes, prisoners of war, and such women as they can ravish from a neighbouring community, or seduce from their husbands’ dwellings. They also abandon to them their own wives when 30 or 40 years old, obtaining in exchange the little girls belonging to the young man’s family. The youthful warrior, therefore, with a number of sisters, can usually succeed in obtaining a few wives by barter. That their personal attractions are faded is not of any high importance; since they are needed chiefly to render him independent of labour. His sensual appetites he is content to gratify, until he becomes a patriarch, by illicit intrigues with other women of the tribe. Of these there are generally some ready to sell or give away their favours. The wives, especially of the very old chiefs, look anxiously forward to the death of their husbands, when they hope, in the usual course of inheritance, to be transferred to the hut of a younger man; for, among nations in this debased state, it is not the woman that is prized, but a woman. Personal attachment is rare. The husband whose wife has been ravished away by a warrior from a neighbouring tribe may be pacified by being presented with another companion. Even in Australia Felix, which is peopled by the most intelligent, industrious, and manly of the Australian race, the young man disappointed of a wife in his own tribe sets off to another, waylays some woman, asks her to elope with him, and, on her refusal, stuns her with his club, and drags her away in triumph. Marriage, indeed, appears too dignified a term to apply to this system of concubinage and servitude which in Australia goes under that name. Travellers have found in the far interior happy families of man and wife, roaming together, with common interests, and united by affection; but such instances are rare.
A large proportion of the young men in Australia can by no means obtain wives. This arises from the numerical disparity between the sexes, which is almost universal in that region, and is chiefly attributable to the practice of infanticide. Child-killing is indeed among the social institutions of that poor and barbarous race. Women have been known to kill and eat their offspring, and men to swing them by the legs and dash out their brains against a tree. The custom is becoming rare among those tribes in constant intercourse with Europeans, but that intercourse itself has caused much of the evil. Half-castes, or the offspring of native women by European fathers, are almost invariably sacrificed. They are held in dread by the people, who fear the growth of a mixed race which may one day conquer or destroy them. Females, also, are killed in great numbers. This class of infanticide is regulated by various circumstances in different communities. Among some tribes all the girls are destroyed until a boy is born; in others, the firstborn is exposed; in others, all above a certain number perish; but everywhere the custom prevails. One of two twins—a rare birth—is almost always killed. It may be ascribed to the miserably poor condition of the people, and the degraded state of the female sex; for in a region where the aborigines have not yet learned to till the soil, and where the means of life are scanty, there will always be an inducement to check the growth of numbers by infanticide; and where women have to perform all the labour, and follow their husbands in long marches or campaigns, ministering to every want they may experience, the trouble of nursing an infant is often saved at the cost of the infant’s life. Neglect also effects the same purpose.
The population, under these circumstances, has always been thin, and is apparently decreasing. Among 421 persons belonging to various tribes in Australia Felix, Eyre remarked that there were in the course of two years and a half only ten children reared. In other places one child to every six women was not an unusual average. This, however, is not all to be ascribed to infanticide. Many of the females abandon themselves so recklessly to vice that they lose all their natural powers, and become incapable of bearing offspring. Eyre found in other parts of Australia that the average of births was four to every woman. In New South Wales the proportion of women to men appears to be as two to three; while in the interior, Sturt calculated that female children outnumbered the male, while with adults the reverse was true. This indicates an awful spread of the practice of infanticide, which we cannot refuse to believe when we remember the facts which travellers of undeniable integrity have made known to us.
To suppose from this that in Australia the natural sentiments of humanity are unknown, would be extremely rash. On the contrary, we find very much that is beautiful in the character of its wild people, and are led to believe that civilization may go far towards elevating them from all their barbarous customs. Women are known to bear about their necks, as relics sacred to affection, the bones of their children, whom they have mourned for years with a pure and deep sorrow. Men have loved and respected their wives; maidens have prized and guarded their virtue; but it is too true that these are exceptions, and that the character and the condition of the female sex in Australia is that of debasement and immorality.
With respect to the prostitute class of the colonial towns, to which allusion has been made, it will be noticed in another part of this inquiry, when we examine into the manners of English and other settlers abroad.
Of prostitutes as a class among the natives themselves, it is impossible to speak separately; for prostitution of that kind implies some advance towards the forms of regular society, and little of this appears yet to be made in that region. From the sketch we have given, however, a general idea may be gained of the state of women and the estimation of virtue among a race second only to the lowest tribes of Africa in barbarity and degradation[58].