The Australian blacks recognize family ties. None of them have more than one wife, but they do not marry within their own particular tribe. They live encamped in bands, and now that they are reduced to small numbers, in entire tribes. They do not build permanent huts, but protect themselves in summer from the sun and hot winds merely by a heap of gum-tree branches, piled up against some sticks, thrust in the ground. When winter comes on, they strip from the trees large pieces of bark, eight or ten feet high, and as wide as the whole circumference of the trunk, forming with these fragments a screen, which they place at the side whence the rain is blowing, and alter if the wind happens to change. Squatted on the bare earth, in the opossum skin which serves the double purpose of bed and clothing, each of them is placed before a hearth of his own. [Fig. 241] is an engraving taken from a photograph of Australian natives.
The Australian Negroes of the present day have guns, and employ little axes for chopping their wood and cutting bark, but it is not so long since the only weapons they possessed were made of hard wood, and their hatchets consisted of sharp stones fastened to the end of sticks, like the flint instruments used by men before the Deluge. There is in fact little or no difference between the people of the age of stone, and the Negroes of Australia, and consequently an acquaintance with the wild manners and customs of these races has been of great advantage to naturalists of our day in throwing light upon the history of primitive man.
M. H. de Castella was greatly struck by the agility of the Australian blacks in climbing gum-trees whose straight stems are often devoid of branches for twenty or thirty feet from their base, and are besides too thick to be clasped. When by perfect prodigies of acrobatism the native reached the wild cats and opossums’ nests, he seized the animals, and threw them to his wife.
This wife carried everything; her last-born in a reed basket hanging from her neck, the slaughtered game in one hand, and in the other a blazing gum branch, to light the fire when the family took up fresh quarters. The man walked in front, carrying nothing but his weapons; then came the wife, and after her, their children according to height.
A batch of Australian blacks is never, by any chance, to be met walking abreast, even when in great numbers, and if a whole tribe is crossing the plains, only a long black file is to be seen moving above the high grass.
242.—NATIVE AUSTRALIAN.
M. de Castella was a spectator of the curious sight which eel-fishing affords among these natives. Holding a spear in each hand, with which to rake up the bottom, they wade through the water up to their waists, balancing and regulating their movements to the even measure of one of their chants. When an eel is transfixed by a stroke of one lance, they pierce it in another part of the body with the second, and then, holding the two points apart, throw the fish upon the ground, the quantity which they take in this manner being enormous. They dispense with saucepans and cooking utensils of all kinds in the preparation of their meals, simply placing the game or fish on bright coals covered over with a little ashes.