AUSTRALIA 



4S3 



AUSTRALIA 



area of 2,948,366 square miles is about 600,000 

 less than that of Europe, and almost equal to 

 that of the United States without Alaska or 

 its island possessions. It is thus second in 

 size only to Canada among the colonial pos- 

 sessions of Great Britain. For Australia, with 



LOCATION MAP 



Showing location of Australia with n-s|>r< -1 in 

 tin- mntinent of Asia and the great islands to 

 th- north. 



the island of Tasmania to the south, const i- 

 - a dependency of Great Britain, and has 

 been known since 1901 as the COMMONWKM.TH 

 OP AUSTRALIA. The article that follows treats 

 of the continental portion of that federation, 

 while Tasmania is considered under its own 

 titlr. Each of the five states of the Common- 

 wealth on the mainland, namely, New South 

 Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia 

 and Western Australia, with the Northern Ter- 

 ritory, is given separate treatment in these 

 volumes. 



The People. The Native Race*. In a con- 

 sideration of Australia the term people includes 

 two classes as distinct as arc the white inhab- 

 itants and the Indians of North America. For 

 Australia also has its native races, or aborig- 

 ines, as they are called, the word meaning lit- 

 rally from the beginning. These natives 

 some characteristics of the negroes, some 

 of the Caucasian peoples* and scholars are 

 inclined to treat them as a race distinct from 



all others. They are dark in color, have either 

 wavy or straight, but never woolly, hair, thick 

 lips and flat nose. Of medium height, they 

 possess an inferior muscular development, nor 

 do they seem any more highly developed 

 mentally or morally. Indeed, by some stu- 

 dents of racial characteristics they are placed 

 at the very bottom of the scale of humanity. 

 They have no fixed dwellings, living in the 

 summer in the open air and with the coming 

 on of winter sheltering themselves in the 

 rudest of bark dwellings. Most of them wear 

 no clothes, though the southernmost tribes 

 make skin rugs for use in the winter. 



As to food, they are far from particular. 

 Any animals which they can kill mammals, 

 birds, lizards, snakes, grubs and even insects 

 are eaten, often half raw. Fire is no mys- 

 tery to them, but is produced by a friction 

 method similar to that shown in the illustra- 

 tion under the article FIRE. They do not 

 cultivate the soil, domesticate animals nor 

 make pottery, but they have fashioned for 

 themselves a number of weapons, in the use 

 of which they are most skilful. Among these 

 are spears, clubs, stone hatchets and, most 

 noted of all, the boomerang (which see). The 

 women, obtained for the establishment of 

 families by purchase or abduction, are looked 

 upon as mere slaves and. are frightfully mis- 

 treated. All the hard work, all the heavy 

 carrying is done by them, the men reserving 

 their strength for hunting and intertribal wars. 



It must be understood that these primitive 

 conditions, which prevailed everywhere at the 

 coming of the white men, now exist only in 

 the wild and unsettled parts of the conti- 

 nent. In the settled districts a few aborigines 

 remain, for the most part on reservations, and 

 these are sometimes employed by the set: 

 in light work. They are lazy by nature, how- 

 ever, and soon give up any continuous em- 

 ployment, but they possess, like the North 

 American Indians, an almost incredible ability 

 to follow trails through the woods and the 

 brush, and are for this reason sometimes of 

 use to the police. It is estimated that there 

 were in Australia about 150,000 of these 

 aborigines at the time the influx of white 

 settlers began, but they have decreased rap- 

 idly, and to-day various estimates place their 

 number anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000. 



\\'i<itc. Inhabitants. These aborigines are not 

 reckoned in with the total population of the 

 Commonwealth, which was 4,872,059 at the last 

 official census (1913). This includes Tasmania, 



