The little huts at Coranderrk are tidy and comfortable, and the people well fed and cared for; but there is something inexpressibly sad about the whole encampment. It is bad enough to see one person dying—say of consumption, or some such fatal disease—but it is worse by far to see a whole people die, no matter how ineffectual they may be in their powers of grappling with the conditions of modern life, for those individuals who are not actually dead are yet in a state of senile decay, and, having lost the wonderful instincts of a savage, are still groping wistfully and ignorantly among the intricate ways of civilization. Still, sometimes if you can borrow a black fellow, to go fishing or trapping with, you may yet catch sight of a spark of the old bushman’s cunning and mysterious lore.
Altogether there are in Victoria seven mission-stations and depôts for aborigines, the number they house being in all only a little over 260. Besides this, there are still a few wandering black fellows, who are given food and clothing when they call at the mission-stations, but they are very few in number, many of them being but half-castes, the total number of the pure-blooded blacks, in 1901, being estimated at only 271, with 381 of mixed blood. [298]
Once, when I was staying up in New South Wales, a little old black fellow, apparently a most genial person, was pointed out to me, who had married a white woman. After a while she had grown tired of the union and forsaken her Othello, on which he brought her back, with the aid of a club, and, finding her still restless, broke one of her legs. Directly the bone had set she ran—or rather hobbled, with the help of a stick—away again; on which he brought her back once more, and broke both her legs, to make sure of her. After this—or so I was told—they remained a most happy and peaceable couple, while, though she was still lame, she was quite sufficiently recovered to limp about the mia-mia and attend adequately to her lord’s wants, which, after all, were not much more numerous than those of old Omar—less, indeed, by the book of verse, for which might be substituted a pipe. Who can say now that, tactfully managed, mixed marriages are not a success?
The lower a man is in the scale of nature, the more compensations he seems to possess. If the brain and reasoning powers are imperfectly developed, the sense of smell, of touch, of hearing, and of sight is intensified. As his brain becomes more mature, he learns a better way to catch and kill his prey than by chasing it on foot, and therefore loses his swiftness. His teeth and jaws become weaker because he can cook his food before eating it. He loses his sense of time because he has clocks and bells to tell it to him; and his instinct for locality, because he has grown to depend on a compass, roads, or signposts. In all matters connected with hunting the aboriginal, in the hard school of necessity, has brought his powers of observation to a fine point that is little short of marvellous to us, who have grown to depend on books for the greater part of all we wish to know. To go to the public library, look through the catalogue, and hunt up the best book on any subject we wish to master; to stuff ourselves up with some special information, so that we may wriggle our way through an examination. It is all very different from the years of patience and endurance that a black fellow brings to the accomplishment of any special task, the mastering of any peculiar knowledge. With the passing of the Australian aboriginal will pass also a minute and intimate knowledge of animal life and habits that no European zoologist can ever touch, and of which the average sportsman, with all his improved appliances for transit and slaughter, has no idea. He will watch a laughing-jackass for hours so that he may track and kill a snake. He will know in what hollow stump an opossum may be lurking, simply by the movements of the flies which are hovering near. He will slip silently into a pool, or billabong, and, diving under the water, seize a duck and break its neck beneath the surface, so noiselessly that none of its companions swimming around it will be disturbed, and so will kill one after another until he has enough; while, when he wishes to decoy pelicans, he will throw stones into the water in such a manner as to give the precise effect of a fish rising. He knows—with an almost unerring knowledge—from which direction the wind may be expected to blow during the night, and so makes his little shelter of boughs on the side from which it will come; while the opening of his camp is always away from it, with the fire in front; and he is the most expert water-finder in the world, knowing at a glance, by the way vegetation grows, where water will be found, and at what a depth, and in what places and where, after a heavy dew, he may be able to collect enough to fill his water-bag, or the shell or skull, with the orifice sealed up, which serves the same purpose; collecting, even in the heart of the desert, where any white man would die of thirst, a sufficiency of water from the long tap-root of the gum-scrub. He knows how to throw the boomerang so as never to miss; how to carve the returning one—short and flat, with a curious twist on its own axis—which is used mainly in trick-throwing or among large flocks of birds, and the long heavy one, which does not return, and is used in all serious hunting; how also to make, and use in the chase and fight, two-handled wooden swords, and clubs, and shields, sometimes beautifully carved, though with handles that are for the most part too small for a European hand.
The black man’s razor is a bivalved, sharp-edged shell, rather like a mussel, with which he tweaks out the hairs—a most painful proceeding, I should imagine. Needles and awls he makes from the leg-bones of the kangaroo, and nets and bags for hunting from the tendons of the larger animals; while he grinds his corn, as does the Indian, between two large stones, the lower one being very slightly hollowed out, and the upper—about the size of a man’s fist—rounded, and usually of a harder kind, a good nether-stone being often carried for many miles.
All fighting laws among the aborigines are as ceremonious and well arranged as those of any medieval tourney, while the marriage laws are exceedingly stringent. A man may not marry a woman of his own family name, which is usually that of some plant or animal, while tribes in some districts are carefully divided into two “phraties,” to guard against possible intermarriage, each half possessing a different “kobong.” Neither will he, except under pressure of the direst necessity, kill an animal that bears that name, for it is his “kobong,” and so sacred to him that, even if he is starving, he will not touch it while it is asleep, but gives it every possible chance of escape.
Some people believe that the black fellow has no religion. This, I really believe, is chiefly owing to the general tendency to so name only our own particular belief, lumping all the others together under the name of “superstition.” “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is another man’s doxy,” as Bishop Warburton once said. Mr. Ramsey Smith, head of the South Australian Department of Public Health, declares the Australian native to be saturated with religion, and, truly, if we would comprehend anything of a people’s beliefs, we must know everything that there is to be known of themselves, their surroundings, and their lives. There is a spiritual religion which strives for purity and goodness for its own sake alone. But most religions, including that of the ancient Jews, have been mainly based on a fear of consequences, which governs alike both civil and personal character. The laws of the black fellow—in spite of the name he has for being at once dirty, primitive, and debased—are, particularly in dealing with all matters of sanitation, even more stringent than those of the Jew, and though the reason he will give you for destroying every scrap that remains over from any animal he has eaten will be that—if an enemy should get hold of it, he would cause him serious injury, or even loss of life; still, in all probability, it was the law of cleanliness which first gave rise to such a belief.
The black fellow’s Bible is his stock of fables, repeated from mouth to mouth, as were the tales of Homer. Most of these legends enforce some lesson or moral, though how much of the actual tales themselves is believed, and how much is recognized as being old wives’ fables, especially concocted to point a moral, it would be hard to say. But this we do know: that the black fellow’s gods are numerous, consisting alike of good and bad spirits, round which are hung legends of the Deluge; of the manner in which the sky is supported; of the origin of the sun—which is a woman—and the moon—which is a man—and why they wax and wane; of the meaning of comets, stars, and eclipses; while his entire moral code is embodied in a series of elaborate laws and ceremonies in connection with phratries and totems, child betrothal, infanticide, and marriage,—in connection with which the laws are extraordinarily strict—corroborees and initiation, from which last ceremony all the women of the tribe are warned away—under the penalty of death—by the “bullroarer,” or “bummer.”
Mr. Rowland, in his book “The New Nation,” tells an amazing story, which I cannot resist repeating here, from the simple fact that it shows so plainly the way that the wits of the black fellows are, in some cases, more than equally balanced against those of the white. In the time of Governor Arthur a drive of natives was attempted, so that they might be separated from the white populace in camps under close supervision, and the constant evils of massacre and outrage between the two races be put an end to. Some 2,000 soldiers, convicts, and settlers were engaged for the task, and a cordon was slowly drawn, in the toils of which it was implicitly believed that every single native in the district must of necessity be confined. Some £30,000 were spent over this human net, with the idea that, once drawn, all the troubles with the natives would be for ever at an end. At last, after many days, the sides of the vast semicircle closed one upon another, and amid the breathless excitement of the entire colony the catch was counted—one boy and one man, at £15,000 a head.