ABORIGINAL TRIBES OF NEW SOUTH WALES AND VICTORIA. 203 



ETHNOLOGICAL NOTES ON the ABORIGINAL TRIBES 



OF NEW SOUTH WALES and VICTORIA. 



Part I. 



By R. H. Mathews, l.s., 



Associe etranger Soc. d'Antlirop. de Paris ; Corres. Memb. 



Anthrop. Soc, Washington, U.S.A., etc. 



[Read before the Royal Society of N.S. Wales, October 5, 1904.~\ 



Introduction. 

 In the following pages it is intended to supply a succinct 

 account of the social organisation, languages and general 

 customs of our aborigines. Throughout a comparatively 

 long life I have had special opportunities of studying the 

 habits of these people. I was born in the Australian bush 

 and black children were among my earliest playmates. In 

 my youth I was engaged in station pursuits in the back 

 blocks of New South Wales and in the new country of 

 Queensland, when the blacks were in their pristine con- 

 dition. In later years I was employed as a surveyor on 

 the Barwon, Namoi, Castlereagh, and other distant inland 

 rivers, where I was continually in contact with the sable 

 sons and daughters of the soil. 



Fortunately, also, I always had a keen proclivity for 

 collecting all the information available in regard to their 

 numerous highly interesting customs. It so happened, too, 

 that I possessed some little capability for investigating the 

 grammatical structure of their language, being able to cope 

 with the difficulty of correctly hearing and correctly writing 

 down the native words. Owing to my familiarity with the 

 ways of blackfellows, I always received the complete con- 

 fidence of the chief men, and thus gained admission to their 

 secret meetings. Moreover, my training as a draftsman 



