V.] THE OCEANIC NEGROES: TASMANIANS. 157 



a fire of wood, after which '' no more was fire lost in our land. 

 The two blackfellows are in the clouds ; in the clear night you 

 see them like stars. These are they who brought fire to our 

 fathers 1 ." 



During the disgraceful colonial wars of extermination, a few 

 weapons of a better type appear to have been 

 introduced from the mainland. But before that 

 time they possessed neither the boomerang nor the 

 throwing-stick, nor the shield of the Australians, nothing in fact 

 except the waddy, not unlike the Irish shillelagh, and two kinds 

 of primitive spears, one a mere sapling some 15 feet long, pointed 

 and hardened by fire, the other about 10 feet long and lighter. 

 As neither had any stone or bone attachments, these rude weapons 

 were really inferior to those of the' Old Stone Age, to which were 

 fixed some of those flint or other spear-heads now found in such 

 abundance in the caves and pleistocene beds of the northern 

 hemisphere. 



In the native diet were included " snakes, lizards, grubs and 

 worms," besides the opossum, wombat, kangaroo, 

 birds and fishes, roots, seeds and fruits, but not 

 human flesh, at least normally. Like the Bushmen, they were 

 gross feeders, consuming enormous quantities of food when they 

 could get it, and the case is mentioned of a woman who was seen 

 to eat from 50 to 60 eggs of the sooty petrel (larger than a duck's), 

 besides a double allowance of bread, at the station on Flinders 

 Island. They had frail bark canoes made fast with thongs or 

 rushes, besides rafts like those of Torres Straits, 



Dwellings. 



but no permanent abodes or huts, beyond branches 

 of trees lashed together, supported by stakes, and disposed 

 crescent-shape with the convex side to windward. On the 

 uplands and along the sea-shore they took refuge in caves, 

 rock-shelters and natural hollows. Usually the men went naked, 

 the women wore a loose covering of skins, and personal orna- 

 mentation was limited to cosmetics of red ochre, plumbago, and 

 powdered charcoal, with occasionally a necklace of shells strung 

 on a fibrous twine. 



1 Op. cit. II. p. 461. 



