Or this:
"The kangaroo ran very fast
But I ran faster;
The kangaroo was fat;
I ate him."
[172] Roy. Geogr. Soc. of Australasia, Vol. V., 29.
[173] The reason why Westermarck is so eager to prove liberty of choice on the part of Australian women is because he has set himself the hopeless task of proving that the lower we go the more liberty woman has, and that "under more primitive conditions she was even more free in that respect than she is now amongst most of the lower races." "As man in the earliest times," he asserts (222), "had no reason … to retain his full-grown daughter, she might go away and marry at her pleasure." Quite the contrary; an Australian, than whom we know no more "primitive" man, had every reason for not allowing her to go away and marry whom she pleased. He looked on his daughter, as we have seen, chiefly as a desirable piece of property to exchange for some other man's daughter or sister.
[174] As distinguished from the more common sham elopement, at which the parents are consulted as usual. In the Kunandaburi tribe, for instance, as Howitt himself tells us (Jour. Anthr. Inst., XX., 60-61) the suitor asks permission of the girl's parents to take her away. "She resists all she can, biting and screaming, while the other women look on laughing." The whole thing is obviously a custom ordered by the parents, and tells us nothing regarding the presence or absence of choice. See the remarks on sham capture in my chapter on Coyness (125).
[175] The reader will note that here are some additional objects usually supposed to be "ornamental," but which, as in all the cases examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close examination to serve other than esthetic purposes. These are intended to charm the women, not, however, as things of beauty, but by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention.
[176] With his usual conscientious regard for facts Westermarck declares (70) that in a savage condition of life "every full-grown man marries as soon as possible."
[177] We are occasionally warned not to underrate the intelligence of the aboriginal Australian. As a matter of fact, there is more danger of its being overrated. Thus it was long believed that what was known as the "terrible rite" (finditur usque ad urethram membrum virile)—see Curr I., 52, 72—was practised as a check to population; but surgeon-general Roth (179) has exploded this idea, and made it seem probable that this rite is merely a senseless counterpart of certain useless mutilations inflicted on females.
[178] Trans. Eth. Soc., New Ser., III, 248.
[179] Gerland (VI., 756) makes the same mistake here as Westermarck. He also refers to Petermann's Mittheilungen for another case of "romantic love." On consulting that periodical (1856, 451) I find that the proof of such love lay in the circumstance that in the quarrels so common in Australian camps, wives would not hesitate to join in and help their husbands!