Formerly owners of the entire face of their country, the Australians are now driven back farther and farther into poor, sterile, and unhealthy regions. Those who remain in contact with the invading European colonists are debased and degenerate, and disappear rapidly. The tribes of purest type, those of the mid-region and of the north coast, have recently been well studied by Stirling, Baldwin Spencer and Gillen, and W. Roth.[548]
The census of 1851 included 55,000 natives in Australia; that of 1881 declared only 31,700; and that of 1891, no doubt better compiled and including newly-discovered districts, gives a return of only 59,464 natives and cross-breeds.[549]
Between 1836 and 1881 the number of natives in Victoria fell from 5000 to 770; the tribe of the Narrinyeri in South Australia, which in 1842 was composed of 3,200 members, was by 1875 reduced to only 511 individuals. But no positive proof has been obtained of diminution in the number of the natives of the interior, nor of those of the west and north coasts.
Most Australians exhibit the sufficiently pure type of the Australian race as I have already described it (p. [285]): dark chocolate-brown skin, stature above the average (1 m. 67); frizzy or wavy hair, very elongated dolichocephalic head (av. ceph. ind., 71.2 in skulls, and 74.5 on the living subject), prominent superciliary arches, nose flat and often convex, sunken at the root, where it is very thin, but much enlarged on the level of the nostrils, thick and sometimes protruding lips, etc. The cranial capacity is rather low (see p. [99]). The pilous system is well developed over the whole body (Figs. [14], [15], [149], [150]). Some of these characters, the dolichocephaly and crooked nose, are common both to the Australians and the Melanesians of the archipelagoes extending north-east of the continent; while other traits (wavy or frizzy hair, etc.) differentiate these two races, and connect the Australians with the Veddahs of Ceylon and with certain of the Dravidian populations of India.
Deviations from the type just described are very slight, and have been attributed, without, I think, much justice, to intermixtures with Malays and Papuans on the coasts; elsewhere deviations are quite limited.
The Australians have great powers of endurance, are temperate and fairly agile; they climb trees readily with the aid of a rattan rope, in the style of natives of India, of the Canacks and the Negroes (p. [275] and Fig. [81]).
Most travellers agree in regard to the low intellectual development of the Australians. However, they have sufficiently complex social customs, an extensive folk-lore,[550] and their children have been known, in the missionary schools, to learn to read and write more quickly than European children; arithmetic only appearing to be outside the limits of their intelligence. It should be remarked in regard to all Australian dialects that they have special words only for the figures one and two, occasionally for three and four; but most frequently “two and one” is used for “three,” and “two and two” for “four” (see p. [223]).
The Australian languages present great resemblances to each other; they all belong to a single family, having no affinity with any other linguistic group. All these languages are agglutinative. The various forms of the words are produced by the addition of suffixes, while in the Malay and Papuan languages they are produced by means of prefixes. Abbreviations, slovenliness of pronunciation, and neologisms are very constant, and rapidly lead to changes in these dialects.