(1.) AUSTRALIAN MAN AND WOMAN.
(See [page 695].)
(2.) WOMEN AND OLD MAN OF THE LOWER MURRAY AND THE LAKES.
(See [page 699].)
The old Australian woman certainly does not possess the projecting jaws, the enormous mouth, and the sausage-like lips of the African, but she exhibits a type of hideousness peculiarly her own. Her face looks like a piece of black parchment strained tightly over a skull, and the mop-like, unkempt hair adds a grotesque element to the features which only makes them still more repulsive. The breasts reach to the waist, flat, pendent, and swinging about at every movement; her body is so shrunken that each rib stands out boldly, the skin being drawn deeply in between them, and the limbs shrivel up until they look like sticks, the elbows and knees projecting like knots in a gnarled branch.
Each succeeding year adds to the hideous look of these poor creatures, because the feebleness of increasing years renders them less and less useful; and accordingly they are neglected, ill-treated, and contemptuously pushed aside by those who are younger and stronger than themselves, suffering in their turn the evils which in their youth they carelessly inflicted on those who were older and feebler.
Mr. Angas has among his sketches one which represents a very old woman of the Port Fairy tribe. They had built their rude huts or miam-miams under some gum-trees, and very much disgusted the exploring party by their hideous appearance and neglected state. There was one old woman in particular, who exemplified strongly all the characteristics which have just been described; and so surpassingly hideous, filthy, and repulsive was she, that she looked more like one of the demoniacal forms that Callot was so fond of painting than a veritable human creature. Indeed, so very disgusting was her appearance, that one of the party was made as ill as if he had taken an emetic.
Not wishing to shock my readers by the portrait of this wretched creature, I have introduced on page preceding, [two younger females] of the same tribe.
The remarkable point about this and one or two other tribes of the same locality and the neighborhood, is the circular mat which is tied on their backs, and which is worn by both sexes. The mat is made of reeds twisted into ropes, coiled round, and fastened together very much as the archer’s targets of the present day are made. The fibres by which the reed ropes are bound together are obtained from the chewed roots of the bulrush. The native name for this mat is paingkoont. One of the women appears in her ordinary home dress, i. e. wearing the paingkoont and her baby, over whose little body she has thrown a piece of kangaroo skin. The mat makes a very good cradle for the child, which, when awake and disposed to be lively, puts its head over the mat and surveys the prospect, but when alarmed pops down and hides itself like a rabbit disappearing into its burrow. The old woman, whose portrait is withheld, was clothed in the paingkoont, and wore no other raiment, so that the full hideousness of her form was exposed to view.
The woman standing opposite is just starting upon a journey. She is better clad than her companion, having beside the paingkoont a rude sort of petticoat. On her back she has slung the net in which she places the roots which she is supposed to dig out of the ground, and, thrust through the end which ties it, she carries the digging-stick, or katta, which serves her for a spade. She has in her hand the invariable accompaniment of a journey,—namely, the fire-stick, smouldering amid dry grass between two pieces of bark, and always ready to be forced into a flame by whirling it round her head.