AFFECTION FOR WOMEN AND DOGS
There is a strange class of men who always stand with a brush in hand ready to whitewash any degraded creature, be he the devil himself. For want of a better name they are called sentimentalists, and they are among men what the morbid females who bring bouquets and sympathy to fiendish murderers are among women. The Australian, unutterably degraded, particularly in his sexual relations, as the foregoing pages show him to be, has had his champions of the type of the "fearless" Stephens. There is another class of writers who create confusion by their reckless use of words. Thus the Rev. G. Taplin asserts (12) that he has "known as well-matched and loving couples amongst the aborigines" as he has amongst Europeans. What does he mean by loving couples? What, in his opinion, are the symptoms of affection? With amusing naïveté he reveals his ideas on the subject in a passage (11) which he quotes approvingly from H.E.A. Meyer to the effect that if a young bride pleases her husband, "he shows his affection by frequently rubbing her with grease to improve her personal appearance, and with the idea that it will make her grow rapidly and become fat." If such selfish love of obesity for sensual purposes merits the name of affection, I cheerfully grant that Australians are capable of affection to an unlimited degree. Taplin, furthermore, admits that "as wives got old, they were often cast off by their husbands, or given to young men in exchange for their sisters or other relations at their disposal" (XXXI.); and again (121):
"From childhood to old age the gratification of appetite and passion is the sole purpose of life to the savage. He seeks to extract the utmost sweetness from mere animal pleasures, and consequently his nature becomes embruted."
Taplin does not mention a single act of conjugal devotion or self-sacrifice, such as constitutes the sole criterion of affection. Nor in the hundreds of books and articles on Australia that I have read have I come across a single instance of this kind. On the subject of the cruel treatment of women all the observers are eloquent; had they seen any altruistic actions, would they have failed to make a record of them?
The Australian's attachment to his wife is evidently a good deal like his love of his dog. Gason (259) tells us that the dogs, of which every camp has from six to twenty, are generally a mangy lot, but
"the natives are very fond of them…. If a white man wants to offend a native let him beat his dog. I have seen women crying over a dog, when bitten by snakes, as if over their own children."
The dogs are very useful to them, helping them to find snakes, rats, and other animals for food. Yet, when mealtime comes, "the dog, notwithstanding its services and their affection for it, fares very badly, receiving nothing but the bones." "Hence the dog is always in very low condition."
Another writer[178] with a better developed sense of humor, says that "It may be doubted whether the man does not value his dog, when alive, quite as much as he does his woman, and think of both quite as often and lovingly after he has eaten them."
As for the women, they are little better than the men. What Mitchell says of them (I., 307) is characteristic. After a fight, he says, the women
"do not always follow their fugitive husbands from the field, but frequently go over, as a matter of course, to the victors, even with young children on their backs; and thus it was, probably, that after we had made the lower tribes sensible of our superiority, that the three girls followed our party, beseeching us to take them with us."