They are fond of ants, worms, and snakes. There are ants in all parts of Australia, and certain varieties are caught by the aborigines. The native stands upon an ant hill and stamps with his feet, whereupon the insects run up his legs. After his shanks are well coated he scrapes the ants off and eats them. The larger kinds are roasted or dried in the sun.
Another delicacy is the beetle, which is consumed both as a worm and as a matured insect. The worms are picked out of the rotten trees and cooked in red-hot ashes. Foreigners who have eaten them say that so served they are not at all bad, and that they look and taste like an omelet.
Snakes and lizards of all kinds are roasted. The enormous iguana lizard is especially liked. This reptile tastes much like a young chicken, and its legs are greedily devoured by the Australian aborigines. It is eaten also throughout South America.
The natives are fond of grasshoppers and locusts, which sometimes come in great swarms. At such times the women gather them by the basketful and the people have a great feast. They first throw the grasshoppers into the fire to burn off the wings and legs and then drag them out and roast each one separately. The flesh so prepared tastes not unlike roasted chestnuts.
There seems little doubt that the Australian aborigines are cannibals. The records show that they were cannibals in the past and according to credible stories the eating of human flesh continues among them in parts of Australia to-day.
The government reports give instances of cannibalism. Some years ago a man named Edwards saw the natives roasting an infant in one of their ovens. He watched the blacks open the body and begin eating the flesh, but the sight made him so faint that he was not able to continue his observations. In his book, “Among the Cannibals,” Carl Lumholtz says that the natives consider nothing so delicious as the flesh of a black man, although any human flesh is a delicacy. In parts of Queensland children who die suddenly are roasted, and there is proof that they have even been killed for food. In western Queensland the flesh of the full-blooded blacks is preferred, but half-caste children are roasted and eaten. The blacks are said to prefer the flesh of the Chinese or the Malays, who are vegetable eaters, to that of meat-eating Europeans, whose flesh is tougher and more salty.
Many Australians have told me that the blackfellows have more intelligence than is generally supposed. They show evidences of reasoning powers and marvellous skill in trailing men and animals. Their children are taught to trace snakes and lizards over bare rocks. Even the tiniest track on the hardest ground does not escape the really untamed aborigine. For this reason blackfellows are regularly attached to the bush police force, like so many bloodhounds, to track escaped criminals or men lost in the desert. The black tracker almost invariably gets his man, even when the criminal is mounted and his pursuer afoot.
The Australian bushmen have a saying: “Get a black and you’ll find water.” Parties going into unknown dry lands in the west take along an aboriginal, for when there is no water to be had from sandy basins or deep hollows in granite rocks which still hold some of the last rain, the blackfellow is able to find roots of desert trees with which to quench thirst. He draws water from these roots by cutting them into short lengths and letting them drain, a drop at a time, into a wooden bowl.
As hunters the blacks get the largest game without firearms. They trap emus, hunting them with dingoes, and driving them into nets and pitfalls. In the wilds, hunters station themselves near the water holes and wait until the emu comes down to drink. They then rig up a net across its path, drive it in, and when it has become entangled, kill it with their spears or clubs. They imitate the call of the bird by pounding on a piece of hollow log. Sometimes a man will cover himself with bushes and thus creep up on an emu and kill it.
The aborigines catch kangaroos in nets or run them down with dogs and spears. They go into the water with bushes about their heads and sneak up on ducks and cranes. To get fish they sometimes poison the water with certain plants and capture them as they rise to the surface. The native way of taking catfish is to wade the streams and feel for them with their feet. They kill the fish by biting deeply into the flesh just back of the head.