FOOD OF THE NATIVES. MODES OF COOKING.
The natives are accustomed to cook such animals by digging a hole in the ground, making a fire in it, and heating the stones found about. The kangaroo is placed in this hole with the skin on, and is covered with heated embers or warm stones.
OPOSSUM. SINGEING.
The opossum which constitutes the more ordinary food of the native is not cooked so much, but only singed, so as to have a flavour of the singed wool; but it is nevertheless palatable enough even to a white man.
VEGETABLE FOOD. THE SHOVEL.
The young natives of the interior usually carry a small wooden shovel (see foreground figure, Plate 12 Volume 1) with one end of which they dig up different roots, and with the other break into the large anthills for the larvae, which they eat: the labour necessary to obtain a mouthful even, of such indifferent food, being thus really more than would be sufficient for the cultivation of the earth according to the more provident arrangements of civilised men. Yet in a land affording such meagre support the Australian savage is not a cannibal: while the New Zealander, who inhabits a much more productive region, notoriously feasts on human flesh.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
Were it expedient to enter here into further details, or upon a longer description of the natives of Australia, I might quote largely from Captain Cook's account of those he saw at Adventure Bay, Van Diemen's Land, as being more detailed and descriptive, both of the natives in the interior, and of those also around the whole circumference of Australia, than any I could give. In the descriptions by Dampier and other navigators who have touched on any part of these shores we recognise the same natives with all their characteristics, and are led to conclude that they are derived from the same stock and, as the judicious compiler of the first History of New Holland considered it most probable from this and other circumstances "that the number is small, and that the interior parts of the country are inhabited,"* I may observe that I have had no reason to entertain a contrary opinion from what I saw of the interior country beyond the Darling. The native population is very thinly spread over the regions I have explored, amounting to nearly a seventh part of Australia. I cannot estimate the number at more than 6000; but on the contrary I believe it to be considerably less. They may increase rapidly if wild cattle become numerous; and as an instance I may refer to the number and good appearance of the Cudjallagong tribe near Macquarie range where they occasionally fell in with a herd of wild cattle.
(*Footnote. History of New Holland pages 31 and 232.)
DESTRUCTION OF THE KANGAROO.