312 Life and Immortality. 



Thrift is unknown to the Australian. His life alternates 

 between satiety and semi-starvation. In summer he goes 

 naked, but in winter he wraps himself in kangaroo skins. 

 A girdle of hair bound about his loins holds his dowak, as 

 his digging-stick is called, and an apron of skins suspended 

 from the girdle affords a protection from shrubs. His food 

 consists largely of animals, which he devours alive, and 

 includes lizards, snakes, the heads being rejected, frogs, 

 white ants, larvae and moths. Other animals are roasted, 

 showing that the Australian knows, contrary 'to an opinion 

 that once prevailed, the method of kindling a fire. In 

 seasons of dearth, when there is a paucity of food-material, 

 cannibalism is general. He then makes an attack upon a 

 neighboring tribe who is his enemy, and if he cannot obtain 

 food in this manner, he scruples not to fall back upon his 

 wife and his children. One obligation of the wife is to keep 

 her husband supplied with vegetable food, such as the roots 

 of the wild yam, seeds of the acacia, sophorae, leaves of the 

 grass-tree, etc. Failing to produce a sufficiency, she is lib- 

 erally treated with maulings and spearings, so that a wife 

 generally appears bruised and gashed all over her body. 



Among the different tribes of Australians, the boomerang 

 is the principal weapon. This is a flat stick, three feet in 

 length, and curves at the centre. It is thrown into the air 

 among birds, jerks in a zigzag, spiral or circular fashion, and 

 when thrown by a person skilled in its use is sure to bring 

 down a few individuals at every throwing. Besides this 

 weapon they have the throwing-stick, flint-pointed spears, 

 shields, stone-hatchets, digging-sticks, netting-needles, nets 

 of sinews, fibres or hairs, water-skins and canoes. 



No government exists among this people outside that of 

 the family, and no laws except certain traditionary rules about 

 property, As for their religion, they have little save their 

 terror of ghosts and demons, and certain superstitious tradi- 

 tional rites applicable to epochs in a man's life, but more espe- 

 cially so at the time of his burial. At ten years of age, a boy 



