Another practice of the natives, when travelling from one place to another, is to put stones up in the trees they pass, at different heights from the ground, to indicate the height of the sun when they passed. Other natives following, are thus made aware of the hour of the day when their friends passed particular points. Captain Grey found the same custom in Western Australia; vol. i. p. 113, he says:—
"I this day again remarked a circumstance, which had before this period elicited my attention, which was, that we occasionally found fixed on the boughs of trees, at a considerable height from the ground, pieces of sandstone, nearly circular in form, about an inch and a half in thickness, and from four to five in diameter, so that they resembled small mill-stones. What was the object of thus fashioning, and placing these stones, I never could conceive, for they are generally in the least remarkable spots. They cannot point out burial places, for I have made such minute searches, that in such case I must have found some of the bones; neither can they indicate any peculiar route through the country, for two never occur near one another."
The power of sorcery appears always to belong, in a degree, to the aged, but it is assumed often by the middle aged men. It is no protection to the possessor, from attack, or injury, on the part of other natives. On the contrary, the greater the skill of the sorcerer, and the more extensive his reputation, the more likely is he to be charged with offences he is unconscious of, and made to pay their penalty. Sorcerers are not ubiquitous, but have the power of becoming invisible, and can transport themselves instantaneously to any place they please. Women are never sorcerers. It is a general belief among almost all the Aborigines, that Europeans, or white people, are resuscitated natives, who have changed their colour, and who are supposed to return to the same localities they had inhabited as black people. The most puzzling point, however, with this theory, appears to be that they cannot make out how it is that the returned natives do not know their former friends or relatives. I have myself often been asked, with seriousness and earnestness, who, among the Europeans, were their fathers, their mothers, and their other relatives, and how it is that the dead were so ignorant, or so forgetful, as not to know their friends when they again returned to the earth.
One old native informed me, that all blacks, when dead, go up to the clouds, where they have plenty to eat and drink; fish, birds, and game of all kinds, with weapons and implements to take them. He then told me, that occasionally individuals had been up to the clouds, and had come back, but that such instances were very rare; his own mother, he said, had been one of the favoured few. Some one from above had let down a rope, and hauled her up by it; she remained one night, and on her return, gave a description of what she had seen in a chaunt, or song, which he sung for me, but of the meaning of which I could make out nothing.
Chapter VI
NUMBERS—DISEASES—CAUSE OF LIMITED POPULATION—CRIMES AGAINST EUROPEANS— AMONGST THEMSELVES—TREATMENT OF EACH OTHER IN DISTRIBUTION OF FOOD, ETC.
There is scarcely any point connected with the subject of the Aborigines of New Holland, upon which it is more difficult to found an opinion, even approximating to the truth, than that of the aggregate population of the continent, or the average number of persons to be found in any given space. Nor will this appear at all surprising, when the character and habits of the people are taken into consideration. Destitute of any fixed place of residence, neither cultivating the soil, nor domesticating animals, they have no pursuits to confine them to any particular locality, or to cause them to congregate permanently in the same district. On the contrary, all their habits have an opposite tendency.
The necessity of seeking daily their food as they require it, the fact of that food not being procurable for any great length of time together in the same place, and the circumstance that its quality, and abundance, or the facility of obtaining it, are contingent upon the season of the year, at which they may visit any particular district, have given to their mode of life, an unsettled and wandering character.
The casual observer, or the passing traveller, has but little, therefore, to guide him in his estimate of the population of the country he may be in. A district that may at one time be thinly inhabited, or even altogether untenanted, may at another be teeming with population. The wanderer may at one time be surrounded by hundreds of savages, and at another, in the same place he may pass on alone and unheeded.
At Lake Victoria, on the Murray, I have seen congregated upwards of six hundred natives at once, again I have passed through that neighbourhood and have scarcely seen a single individual; nor does this alone constitute the difficulty and uncertainty involved in estimating the numbers of the Aborigines. Such are the silence and stealth with which all their movements are conducted, so slight a trace is left to indicate their line of march, and so small a clue by which to detect their presence, that the stranger finds it impossible to tell from any thing that he sees, whether he is in their vicinity or not. I have myself often when travelling, as I imagined in the most retired and solitary recesses of the forest, been suddenly surprised by the unexpected appearance of large bodies of natives, without being in the least able to conjecture whence they had come, or how they obtained the necessaries of life, in what appeared to me an arid and foodless desert.