Apart from magic and birds Australian lovers appear not to have been without means of communicating with one another. Howitt says that if a Kurnai girl took a fancy to a man she might send him a secret message asking, "Will you find me some food?" And this was understood to be a proposal—a rather unsentimental and utilitarian proposal, it must be confessed. According to one of the correspondents of Curr (III., 176) the natives along the Mary River even made use of a kind of love-letters which, he says, "were peculiar."
"When the writer was once travelling with a black boy the latter produced from the lining of his hat a bit of twig about an inch long and having three notches cut on it. The black boy explained that he was a dhomka (messenger), that the central notch represented himself, and the other notches, one the youth sending the message, the other the girl for whom it was intended. It meant, in the words of Dickens, 'Barkis is willin'.' The dhomka sewed up the love-symbol in the lining of his hat, carried it for months without divulging his secret to his sable friends, and finally delivered it safely. This practice appeared to be well-known, and was probably common."
Such a "love-letter," consisting of three notches cut in a twig, symbolically sums up this whole chapter. The difference between this bushman's twig and the love-letter of a civilized modern suitor is no greater than the difference between aboriginal Australian "love" and genuine romantic love.
ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC
Between the northern extremity of Australia and the southern extremity of New Guinea, about ninety miles wide, lies Torres Strait, discovered by a Spaniard in 1606, and not visited again by whites till Captain Cook sailed through in 1770. This strait has been called a "labyrinth of islands, rocks, and coral reefs," so complicated and dangerous that Torres, the original discoverer, required two months to get through.
WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE
The larger islands in this strait are of special interest to students of the phenomena of love and marriage, for on them it is not only permissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men. Needless to say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so near Queensland, are not Australians. They are Melanesians, but their customs are insular and unique. Curr (I., 279) says of them that they are "with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people who cultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and, un-Australian-like, treat their women with some consideration."
Luckily the customs of these islanders have been carefully and intelligently studied by Professor A.C. Haddon, who published an entertaining account of them in a periodical to which one usually looks for instruction rather than amusement.[181] Professor Haddon combines the two. On the island of Tud, he tells us, when boys undergo the ordeal of initiation into manhood, one of the lessons taught them is: "You no like girl first; if you do, girl laugh and call you woman." When a girl likes a man, she tells his sister and gives her a ring of string. On the first suitable opportunity the sister says to her brother: "Brother, I have some good news for you. A woman loves you." He asks who it is, and, if willing to go on with the affair, tells his sister to ask the girl to keep an appointment with him in some spot in the bush. On receipt of the message the enamoured girl informs her parents that she is going into the bush to get some wood, or food, or some such excuse. At the appointed time the man meets her; and they sit down and yarn, without any fondling. The ensuing dialogue is given by Haddon in the actual words which Maino, chief of Tud, used:
"Opening the conversation, the man says, 'You like me
proper?'
"'Yes,' she replies, 'I like you proper with my heart
inside. Eye along my heart see you—you my man.'