The Aborigines of Australia

by R.N. Richard Sadleir

Two stray bullocks having wandered amongst the Lake tribes, they took them for demons, in which they believed, and decamped in great terror; they named them Wundawityeri, as beings with spears upon their heads.

There is a very tragic history of these tribes: that the survivors of the “Maria,” wrecked on the coast, supposed to be twenty-five in number, men, women, and children, were induced to place themselves under their guidance to lead them to a whaling station at Encounter Bay. The native guides took advantage of their being separated in crossing the Coorong, quietly placed a man behind each of the whites, and at a signal clubbed them. The poor wanderers had marched 80 miles from the wreck, when they were thus treacherously murdered. A party of police were despatched; they found the camp, in which were large quantities of clothing and other articles. The officers seized two of the most desperate men, and then hanged them up by the neck to a tree, and shot two others. The natives gazed for a minute at the suspended bodies, and then fled. They never cut down the bodies, which remained hanging until they dropped from the trees.

In some instances, the native secures his ngaitye in the person of a snake, he pulls out its teeth or sews up its mouth, and puts it in a basket. These snakes have suddenly given birth to thirty young ones, when it becomes necessary to destroy them. It seems that their belief in Ngaitye is also peculiar to the natives of the Taowinyeri. One saw his God in the shark, the eel, the owl, the lizard, fish, and creeping things. How deluded and debased is man without Divine revelation, yet we are told by philosophers and their followers that all men have to do is to study nature, and there read the character of the Deity. But have they ever done so through ages? Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, have all changed the glory of God into four-footed beasts and creeping things; even leeks and onions have been worshipped. Why should the aborigines be an exception? Divine revelation alone teaches man the true character of the Divine Being, “for man by wisdom cannot find out God.”

With regard to the advantages of civilization, they do not believe the same to be the result of a superior intellect, or of religion, but of a resurrection from the dead. “Blackfellow by-and-by jump up whitefellow,” is the common mode of expressing their belief.

The Rev. A. Meyer, in his pamphlet, gives some interesting particulars of these people. He says they do not appear to have any story as to the origin of the world, and they believe in the transmigration of souls. Men have been transformed into animals, even into stones; to the latter they give the names of men and women, and point out their head, feet, hands, and their waist and face. In one of their dances, one that had been speared and wounded ran into the sea, and was transformed into a whale, and ever afterwards blew the water out of the wound in his neck. Others became fish, others became opossums; and thus they account for the creation of animals and fish, &c., &c.

Of the diversity of dialects, they have a tradition that when an old woman named Wurruri died, the various nations assembled, and one tribe ate her flesh and others ate her intestines, and they all thus acquired different dialects. Certainly nothing here indicates the dispersion of Babel.

On Nurundere’s removal, he left his son behind. On discovering this, he threw his spear to him with a line attached. The son thus succeeded in reaching his father, and this line is the way the dead reach Nurundere, who provides men with wives, and converts old men into young ones; therefore they have no fear of the future. Some of the legends are very obscene.

They have curious legends about animals. They conceive the turtle and the snake exchanged the venomous fangs. A battle took place between the pelican and the magpie about fish; in the struggle the magpie was rolled in the ashes and the pelican became besmeared with scales of the fish, and so had white breasts. They believe in two Wood Demons; the one assumes any shape, sometimes an old man, then a bird, to lure individuals into his reach that he may destroy them.

The noise on the Lake of Alexandrina is very remarkable, and the cause was long undiscovered. Of course it is attributed by the blacks to a water spirit. It is heard with a booming sound, resembling distant cannon or an explosive blast, at other times like the falling of a heavy body in the water. This now is known to be caused by a bird.

The cave figures are very remarkable, and seem to puzzle every writer on their origin or use. It is very probable they were connected in some way with religious observances, which the natives are very unwilling to divulge.