52 INTERMIXTURE OF CERTAIN RACES 



gives rise to scenes of debauchery, that the prostitution of 

 native females with the whites had assumed considerable pro- 

 portions, " considering that the Australians lend their women 

 to the convicts for a slice of bread or a pipe of tobacco." 1 It 

 is useless to cite other testimony after the chief defender of the 

 Australian race has thus expressed himself. 



It is thus perfectly certain that numerous alliances have taken 

 place and are taking place between the Europeans and the native 

 women. The inhabitants of the colony, who could not but be 

 aware of it, have had recourse to a singular hypothesis, accepted 

 by Cunningham and recently by Waitz. They have imagined 

 that the Australian husbands, excited by jealousy, killed all the 

 new-born children of mixed blood ; and to these hypothetical 

 massacres (of which there is no proof whatever) they attribute 

 the rarity of cross-breeds. In order that this tale should 

 acquire some probability, it is first requisite that all the Aus- 

 tralian women should be under the dominion of jealous and 

 ferocious husbands, and that none of the females had the ma- 

 ternal instinct sufficiently developed to save her child from the 

 fury of her husband. Cunningham, in accepting this explana- 

 tion, forgets that he in the same page relates that the Aus- 

 tralians prostitute their gins to the first comer for a pipe of 

 tobacco. Such beings would not feel themselves much disho- 

 noured by the birth of the strange child. But here is an instance 

 proving that the Australians are not altogether devoid of 

 humour ; showing, at least, that they have no notion of con- 

 jugal honour. Boiigarri, of whom we have already spoken, 

 and who in 1825 was the most celebrated chief of the Austra- 1 

 lian hordes of Port Jackson, treated as his son the offspring of 

 the adulterous intercourse of his gin with a convict of the place. 

 When he was asked how it came to pass that his son had such 

 a fair complexion, he replied jocularly, " that his wife was very 

 fond of white bread and had partaken too much of it." He 

 invariably returned the same answer to inquirers. 1 If a war- 



1 Cunningham, loc. cit., vol. ii, p. 7. 



2 M. Lesson has received such an answer from Bongarri. Cunningham 

 cites it as a standing joke of the chief, who, he adds, " still keeps on repeat- 

 ing it." Lesson, loc. cit. ; Cunningham, loc. cit., vol. ii, p. 18. 



