I bought several boomerangs the other day for fifty cents apiece. The boomerang is merely a flat curved piece of wood, about two inches wide and from twenty inches to a yard long. It is so shaped that when correctly hurled it will return to the thrower. The natives display great skill in throwing boomerangs, but do not, as I had supposed, use them as weapons. They sometimes kill small birds with them, but usually the sticks are merely playthings. For fighting and for all heavy hunting the blackfellows prefer spears and lances, some of which weigh as much as four or five pounds and are nine feet in length. They are barbed with bone, flint, iron, or hard wood.
As far as I can learn, the aborigines reverence no Great Father as do our Indians, although they believe in a future state and happy hunting grounds. They have a great dread of ghosts and demons, and think that certain places, such as caves and thickets, are haunted by them. Their witch doctors are supposed to cure diseases, which they are sure are caused by spirits. The doctors pretend to locate the demon, and to suck pieces of wood out of the body where the pain is. The blacks are convinced that most of their woes are due to sorcery, and that certain men can cause others to fall sick and die. They believe their medicine men can make rain and so hold them responsible for drought as well as for any other suffering of the tribe. The aborigines use all sorts of charms to ward off evil spirits. They have an idea that the white settlers are dead natives come to life again and claim that they themselves will appear as white men after death.
In their fondness for any kind of sport the Australians sometimes shoot turkeys from an airplane. The males of one variety of this bird always tend the nest when it contains hatching eggs.
A full-grown kangaroo standing on his hind legs may be taller than a man, but his newborn infant is often only an inch long. The baby is almost transparent and must stay a long time in the mother’s pouch.
As the future state of the aboriginal is thought to depend largely on how he is buried, the natives are very careful to inter their dead fellows with certain rites. The men are usually trussed up before burial. The knees of the corpse are bent up to its neck and tied there, the arms are bound to the sides, and the calves forced up to the thighs. Then rugs of skins or pieces of bark are fastened about the body, and it is buried three or four feet deep in the sand, a mound covered with logs being erected above it. As for the women and children, they are considered of no account, either dead or alive, and their remains are usually rolled up between sheets of bark and covered with earth.
In some parts of Australia the aborigines practise cremation, while in others the dead bodies are dried before fires until they turn into mummies. Some tribes lay the dead out upon platforms in the trees, and allow the birds to clean the bones, just as the bones of Parsees are cleaned by the vultures when the dead are exposed in the Towers of Silence at Bombay. Afterward the bones are buried in the earth or dropped into hollow trees.
The aborigines of Australia are a dying race. Nobody knows how many were here two centuries ago, but it is estimated that there are now only sixty thousand of them left. Of these perhaps a fourth are in Queensland, a half in Western Australia, and ten thousand in the Northern Territory. There are only about one hundred in the state of Victoria, and only about fifteen hundred in New South Wales. South Australia has sixteen thousand. The native race of Tasmania is entirely extinct, its last member having died in 1876. These figures are not exact, for no accurate census of the aborigines has ever been taken. They live in the wilds, and in the vast regions of unexplored Australia no one can tell how many there are.