CHAPTER IV BLACKFELLOWS' "HOMES"
One of the first things of which a little child takes notice is its home. The pictures on the wall, the pretty things all around, the flowers in the garden are a source of ever-increasing delight to its growing consciousness. The older it grows the more it comes to know and love its home. Some of those who read this book will, perhaps, have very beautiful homes richly decked with all that art and money can supply, others will have smaller and plainer ones, but the children of wild Australia have scarcely anything that can be called a home at all.
A blackfellows' camp will consist of a number of the plainest and rudest huts that one can either imagine or describe. Sometimes there is not even a hut, but they live entirely in the open air on the bank of some creek or stream with merely a breakwind of boughs to keep off the wind and rain. During bad weather they will all huddle together as close to the breakwind as they can, whilst their limbs shake and their teeth chatter with cold.
More often, however, something in the way of a hut is made. A few pieces of stick, which will easily bend, will be driven into the ground, covered with sheets of bark and a few boughs and perhaps plastered over with mud. Sometimes, where kangaroos are plentiful, some dried skins will be used instead of bark and boughs. There will, of course, be nothing in the way of chairs or tables, a few skins and a pitchi or two will probably be the only furniture, but a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends will lie around. Some eight or nine souls may claim the hut as home.
These huts are arranged according to a fixed plan. Some will face in one direction, some in another. Thus a man's hut must never face in the same direction as that of his mother-in-law and certain other of his relatives.
A native camp always has a most untidy appearance. All kinds of things are left lying about, but as the black people are very honest nothing is ever stolen. They will give their things away freely but they will never think of taking what is not their own. Most of their time is spent out of doors. They only use their huts in wet and windy weather or when the nights are cold. Their food is always cooked and eaten outside, and bones and all kinds of remnants are littered about everywhere, but as they usually have several dogs these things do not remain for long. How thankful you and I ought to be for our homes and our home comforts, however plain and humble those homes may be!
If food is becoming scarce the people will often leave their camp altogether and migrate further up the river where it is more plentiful, for their camps, you must remember, are nearly always built upon a river's bank. Sometimes there may have been heavy rain in one part of their country and very little in another. Then they will move to where grass and game are more plentiful. We expect our food to be brought to our home, but the blacks take their homes to their food. Sometimes after a death, too, they will desert their settlement and encamp elsewhere. The dead man may have been a very troublesome person to get on with when alive, and they think if they bury him near his old camp and then move away themselves his ghost will not know where to find them and they will be rid of him altogether. This frequent moving of their homes is in many ways a very good thing. If they stayed too long in one place their huts would soon become very insanitary and diseases would begin to work havoc among them.
In the camp the old man's word is law. They even decide what food may be eaten and what must be left alone. They manage to forbid all the more delicate morsels to all the younger members of the tribe and so secure the best of everything for themselves. Women and girls are of little account among them. They are in fact but the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the men, and their life is one of terrible and never-ending drudgery. The little girls, of course, do not have to work, but they are seldom made such pets of as are the little boys. At fourteen they are girls no longer and their life of drudgery begins.