ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE

The founders of the Australian race, Curr believes, were Africans, and may have arrived in one canoe. The distance from Africa to Australia is, however, great, and there are innumerable details of structure, color, custom, myth, implements, language, etc., which have led the latest authorities to conclude that the Australian race was formed gradually by a mixture of Papuans, Malayans, and Dravidians of Central India. Topinard has given reasons for believing that there are two distinct races in Australia. However that may be, there are certainly great differences in the customs of the natives. As regards the relations of the sexes, luckily, these differences are not so great as in some other respects, wherefore it is possible to give a tolerably accurate bird's-eye view of the Australians as a whole from this point of view.

PERSONAL CHARMS OF AUSTRALIANS

Once in awhile, in the narrative of those who have travelled or sojourned among Australians, one comes across a reference to the symmetrical form, soft skin, red lips, and white teeth of a young Australian girl. Mitchell in his wanderings. saw several girls with beautiful features and figures. Of one of these, who seemed to be the most influential person in camp, he says (I., 266): "She was now all animation, and her finely shaped mouth, beautiful teeth, and well-formed person appeared to great advantage as she hung over us both, addressing me vehemently," etc. Of two other girls the same writer says (II., 93):

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The youngest was the handsomest female I had ever seen

See an elaborate discussion of this question by the Rev. John Mathew in the Journal of the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, Vol. XXIII., 335–449.

PERSONAL CHARMS OF AUSTRALIANS

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amongst the natives. She was so far from black that the red color was very apparent in her cheeks. She sat before me in a corner of the group, nearly in the attitude of Mr. Bailey's fine statue of Eve at the fountain, and apparently equally unconscious that she was naked. As I looked upon her for a moment, while deeply regretting the fate of her mother, the chief, who stood by, and whose hand had been more than once laid upon my cap, as if to feel whether it were proof against the blow of a waddy, begged me to accept of her in exchange for a tomahawk !

Eyre, another famous early traveller, writes on this topic (II., 207-208).

"Occasionally, though rarely, I have met with females in the bloom of youth, whose well-proportioned limbs and symmetry of figure might have formed a model for the sculptor's chisel. In personal appearance the females are, except in early youth, very far inferior to the men. When young, however, they are not uninteresting. The jet black eyes, shaded by their long dark lashes, and the delicate and scarcely formed features of incipient womanhood give a soft and pleasing expression to a countenance that might often be called good-looking-occasionally pretty."

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1

Occasionally, though rarely," and then only for a few years, is an Australian woman attractive from our point of view. As a rule she is very much the reverse-dirty, thinlimbed, course-featured, ungainly in every way; and Eyre tells us why this is so. The extremities of the women, he says, are more attenuated than those of the men; probably because" like most other savages, the Australian looks upon his wife as a slave," makes her undergo great privations and do all the hard work, such as bringing in wood and water, tending the children, carrying all the movable property. while on the march, often even her husband's weapons:

"In wet weather she attends to all the outside work, whilst her lord and master is snugly seated at the fire.

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If

See, e.g., the hideous pictures of Australian women enclosed in G. W. Earl's The Pupuans. Spencer and Gillen's admirable volume also contains pictures of young women who look twice their age. After the age of twenty, the authors write, the face becomes wrinkled, the breasts pendulous, the whole body shrivelled. At fifty they reach “a stage of ugliness which baffled description "(46, 40).

there is a scarcity of food, she has to endure the pangs of hunger, often, perhaps, in addition to ill-treatment and abuse. No wonder, then, that the females, and especially the younger ones (for it is then they are exposed to the greatest hardships), are not so fully or so roundly developed in person as the men."

The rule that races admire those personal characteristics which climate and circumstances have impressed on them is not borne out among Australians. An arid soil and a desiccating climate make them thin as a race, but they do not admire thinness. "Long-legged,' "Long-legged," "thin-legged," are favorite terms of abuse among them, and Grey once heard a native sing scornfully Oh, what a leg,

You kangaroo-footed churl!

Nor is it beauty, in our sense of the word, that attracts them, but fat, as in Africa and the Orient. I have previously quoted Brough Smyth's assertion that an Australian woman, however old and ugly, is in constant danger of being stolen if she is fat. That women have the same standard of "taste," appears from the statement of H. E. A. Meyer (189), that the principal reason why the men anoint themselves with grease and ochre is that it makes them look fat and "gives them an air of importance in the eyes of the women, for they admire a fat man however ugly." But whereas these men admire a fat woman for sensual reasons, the women's preference is based on utilitarian motives. Low as their reasoning powers are, they are shrewd enough to reflect that a man who is in good condition proves thereby that he is "somebody "—that he can hunt and will be able to bring home some meat for his wife too. This interpretation is borne out by what was said on a previous page (278) about one of the reasons why corpulence is valued in Fiji, and also by an amusing incident related by the eminent Australian explorer George Grey (II., 93). He had reproached his native guide with not knowing anything, when the guide replied:

"I know nothing! I know how to keep myself fat; the

CRUEL TREATMENT OF WOMEN

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young women look at me and say, 'Imbat is very handsome, he is fat-they will look at you and say, 'He not good-long legs-what do you know? Where is your fat? What for do you know so much, if you can't keep fat?"

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CRUEL TREATMENT OF WOMEN

Eyre was no doubt right in his suggestion that the inferiority of Australian women to the men in personal appearance was due to the privations and hardships to which the women were subjected. Much as the men admire fat in a woman, they are either too ignorant, or too selfish otherwise, to allow them to grow fat in idleness. Women in Australia never exist for their own sake but solely for the convenience of the men. "The man," says the Rev. H. E. A. Meyer (11), regarding them more as slaves than in any other light, employs them in every possible way to his own advantage. The wives were the absolute property of the husband," says the Rev. G. Taplin (XVII. to XXXVII.), " and were given away, exchanged, or lent, as their owners saw fit." poor creatures are always seen to a disadvantage, being. the slaves of their husbands and of the tribes." "The women in all cases came badly off when they depended upon what the men of the tribes chose to give them."

"The

"The woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddy or a yam-stick, and not unfrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering their lubras. The woman's life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed and the last considered in any way. That many of them die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder.

The condition of the women has no influence over their treatment, and a pregnant female is dealt with and is expected to do as much as if she were in perfect health. condition of the native women is wretched and miserable in

The

the extreme; in fact, in no savage nation of which there is any record can it be any worse. And again (p. 72): "The men think nothing of thrashing their wives, knocking them on the head, and inflicting frightful gashes; but they never beat the boys. And the sons treat their mothers very badly. Very often mere lads will not hesitate to strike and throw stones at them."

"Women," says Eyre (322), "are frequently beaten about the head with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences." There is hardly one, he says, that has not some frightful scars on the body; and he saw one who "appeared to have been almost riddled with spear-wounds." "Does a native meet a woman in the woods and violate her, he is not the one to feel the vengeance of the husband, but the poor victim whom he has abused" (387). "Women surprised by strange blacks are always abused and often massacred" (Curr, I., 108). "A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached if he succeeds in carrying one off; otherwise he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands" (86). "Whenever they can, blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished, and often slain afterward if they cannot be conveniently carried off." The natives of Victoria "often break to pieces their six-feet-long sticks on the heads of the women" (Waitz, VI., 775). In the case of a man killing his own gin [wife], he has to deliver up one of his own sisters for his late wife's friends to put to death" (W. E. Roth, 141). After a war, when peace is patched up, it sometimes happens that "the weaker party give some nets and women to make matters up" (Curr, II., 477). In the same volume (331) we find a realistic picture of masculine selfishness at home:

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"When the mosquitoes are bad, the men construct with forked sticks driven into the ground rude bedsteads, on which they sleep, a fire being made underneath to keep off with its smoke the troublesome insects. No bedsteads,