PLATE XIII
1. The game of “gorri,” Humbert River, Northern Territory.
2. A “Kutturu” duel, Aluridja tribe.
The children sleep with or close to their parents. When an aboriginal has more wives than one, his camp is subdivided according to their number, and he sleeps with his favourite.
The strangest conditions reign on Groote Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the women practically live apart from the men during the whole of the day, and only come into camp after sundown to deliver the food supplies they have collected over day. When on the march, every adult female carries two big sheets of paper-bark with her, which she holds with her hands, one in front and another behind her person. Whenever a stranger approaches, they duck behind these sheets of bark, as into a box, for cover.
No matter when or where an aboriginal camps, he constructs a brushwood shelter or windbreak at the head-end of his resting place. This consists of a few branches or tussocks stuck in the ground or piled against any bush, which might be growing upon the patch of ground selected. Under ordinary circumstances, this is the only shelter erected.
Even under the best of conditions, the night’s rest of an aboriginal is hard, and at times very cold and wet. It is not an uncommon experience for a person to sit up part of the night, hugging a fire, and when the sun is up to lie in its warmth to make good the sleep lost.
During a run of wet weather or when the camp is to be of a more permanent nature, different kinds of structures are erected, or already existing habitations selected, which will afford a better shelter than the crude structures referred to.