On comparing a vocabulary of the language spoken by the natives on the Darling with other vocabularies obtained by various persons on different parts of the coast I found a striking similarity in eight words, and it appears singular that all these words should apply to different parts of the human body. I could discover no term in equally general use for any other object as common as the parts of the body, such for instance as the sun, moon, water, earth, etc. By the accompanying list of words used at different places to express the same meaning,* it is obvious that those to which I have alluded are common to the natives both in the south-eastern and south-western portions of Australia; while no such resemblance can be traced between these words and any in the language spoken by natives on the northern coast. Now from this greater uniformity of language prevailing throughout the length of this large island, and the entire difference at much less distance latitudinally, it may perhaps be inferred that the causes of change in the dialect of the aborigines have been more active on the northern portion of Australia than throughout the whole extent from east to west. The uniformity of dialect prevailing along the whole southern shore seems a fact worthy of notice as connected with any question respecting the origin of the language, and whether other people or dialects have been subsequently introduced from the northern or terrestrial portion of the globe. These words although few may be useful to philologists as specimens of the general language and, as the names of parts of the body can be obtained by travellers from men the most savage by only pointing to each part, comparisons may be thus extended to the natives of other shores.
(*Footnote. See Appendix 2.1)
I am not aware that any affinity has been discovered, at least in single words, between the Australian language and that of the Polynesian people;* but with very slight means of comparison I may perhaps be excused for noticing the resemblance of Murroa, the name of the only volcanic crater as yet found in Australia to Mouna-roa, the volcano of the Sandwich Islands; and that tao, the name of the small yam or root eaten by Australians, is similar to taro, the name of thirty-three varieties of edible root and having the same meaning in the Friendly and Society Isles and also in the Sandwich Islands. (See Cook's Voyages and Polynesian Researches by William Ellis.)
(*Footnote. Mr. Threlkeld has detected in it a similarity of idiom to the languages of the South Sea islanders and the peculiarity of a dual number common to all. See his Australian Grammar, Sydney 1834.)
HABITS OF THOSE OF VAN DIEMEN'S LAND THE SAME.
The natives of Van Diemen's Land, the only inhabited region south of Australia, are said to have been as dark as the negro race and to have had woolly hair like them. Little is known of the language and character of the unfortunate Tasmanian aborigines, and this is the more to be regretted considering how useful a better knowledge of either might have been in tracing the progressive extension of the Australasian people. The prevailing opinion at present is that the natives of Van Diemen's Land were also much more ferocious than the natives of Australia. But, brief as the existence of these islanders has been on the page of history, these characteristics are very much at variance with the descriptions we have of the savages seen by the earliest European visitors, and especially by Captain Cook who thus describes those he saw at Adventure Bay in 1777: "Their colour is a dull black, and not quite so deep as that of the African negroes. It should seem also that they sometimes heighten their black colour by smoking their bodies, as a mark was left behind on any clean substance, such as white paper, when they handled it." Captain Cook then proceeds to describe the hair as being woolly, but all the other particulars of that description are identical with the peculiarities of Australian natives; and Captain King stated, according to the editor of the Northern Voyage of Cook, that "Captain Cook was very unwilling to allow that the hair of the natives seen in Adventure Bay WAS woolly." The hair of the natives we saw in the interior and especially of the females had a very frizzled appearance and never grew long; and I should rather consider the hair of the natives of Tasmania as differing in degree only from the frizzled hair of those of Australia.
HABITS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ABORIGINES.
Instead of the ferocious character latterly attributed to the natives of Van Diemen's Land we find on the contrary that Captain Cook describes them as having "little of that fierce or wild appearance common to people in their situation;" and a historian* draws a comparison, also in their favour, between them and the natives of Botany Bay, of whom THREE stood forward to oppose Captain Cook at his first landing. The ferocity subsequently displayed by natives of Van Diemen's Land cannot fairly be attributed to them therefore as characteristic of their race, at least until extirpation stared them in the face and excited them to acts of desperate vengeance against all white intruders.
(*Footnote. The History of New Holland by the Right Honourable William Eden, 1787 page 99.)
The habits and customs of the aboriginal inhabitants are remarkably similar throughout the wide extent of Australia, and appear to have been equally characteristic of those of Van Diemen's Land: geological evidence also leads us to suppose that this island has not always been separated from the mainland by Bass Strait. The resemblance of the natives of Van Diemen's Land to those of Northern Australia seemed indeed so perfect that the first discoverers considered them "as well as the kangaroo, only stragglers from the more northern parts of the country;" and as they had no canoes fit to cross the sea, that New Holland, as it was then termed, "was nowhere divided into islands, as some had supposed."