ABORIGINAL CHILDREN AND NATIVE HUT
Where, as on the mission stations, the Gospel is preached to this poor people it brings new joy and hope to the women. There is no other hope for them, nothing else that saves them from the slavery in which they are compelled to live. On the mission stations are real homes, houses like our own, into which love has entered and where woman is no longer slave or chattel, but a queen. Each family on these settlements has its own little holding fenced and cleared in which fruit, flowers, and vegetables and, perhaps, rice and maize are grown. The cottages are patterns of neatness both without and within, so tremendous is the difference the religion of Jesus Christ makes to this poor degraded people. If we had more missionaries we should have many more such homes and many more of the black women would enter into the meaning of those words in the twentieth chapter of St John—"The disciples went away again to their own home" and found the Resurrection light shining there in all its beauty.
Perhaps nothing would give us so good an idea of the position of women and girls among this people as to take our place in a native camp on the morning of some aboriginal girl's wedding day. The poor little bride, she will probably not be more than about fourteen, will have been told that her husband has come to fetch her. She has very likely never seen him before, although she was engaged to him as soon as she was born, and he will probably be much older than she. She will cry a good deal and say she does not want to go, but she knows very well that by the laws of her tribe she must do so. Her father, expecting rebellion, will be standing by her side with a spear and a heavy club in his hand. The moment she attempts to resist her capture (for it is really nothing less) a blow from the spear will remind her she must go. If she tries, as she probably will, to run away the heavy club will fell her to the ground. Her husband may then begin to show his authority. He will seize her by her hair and drag her off in the the direction of his mia. She will very likely make her teeth meet in the calf of his leg, but it will be no good. She will only receive a kick from his bare foot in return. Arrived at her new home she has to cook her husband a dinner and then sit quietly by his side while he eats it. When he has finished she may have what is left, although he, not improbably, has been throwing pieces to the dogs all the time.
Such are the marriage ceremonies in wild Australia.
CHAPTER V EDUCATION
There are no schools in wild Australia, yet it must not be thought that the children receive no education. On the contrary their education begins at a very early age and is continued well into manhood and womanhood. Up to the age of seven or eight boys and girls play together and remain under their mother's care, but a separation then takes place and schooldays, if we may call them by that name, begin. The boys leave the society of the girls and sleep in the bachelor's camp. They begin to accompany their fathers on long tramps abroad. They are taught the names and qualities of the different plants and animals which they see, and the laws and legends of their tribe. Lessons of reverence and obedience to their elders are instilled into their young minds, and they have impressed upon them that they must never attempt to set up their own will against the superior will of the tribe. They are taught to use their eyes, and to take note of the footprints of the different animals and birds, and eventually to track them to their haunts. In this art of tracking many of them become wonderfully skilled. They will often say how long it is since a certain track was made, and in the case of a human foot-mark will often tell whose it is. They will say whether the traveller was a man or a woman, and in some cases have been known to say, quite correctly, that the man was knock-kneed or slightly lame. Trackers employed by the police have often traced a man's footsteps over stony and rocky ground, being able to tell, from the displacing of a stone here and there, that the man whom they were seeking had passed that way. On one occasion a clergyman was travelling in the bush when he was met by an aboriginal boy who told him that a man had gone along that way earlier in the day, had been thrown from his horse about five miles further on but had not been hurt very much because he had got up after a few minutes and had gone after his horse; the man, however, was slightly lame, and the horse had cast a shoe. The same evening the clergyman met the man in question and found that the native's account of what happened was correct in every detail. He had gained his information entirely from careful observation of the tracks.