386 PRINCIPAL SIR W. TURNER ON 



The migrations of men for a long distance by land is a question of time and food 

 supply, and if the impedimenta of travel are bulky and numerous, beasts of burden or 

 other aids to locomotion are required. If migration takes place on water, properly 

 constructed and sufficiently large craft for conveying man and his impedimenta are 

 necessary. As the Tasmanians lived on an island it is important to inquire if they, and 

 presumably their ancestors, were a seafaring people. The statement has sometimes been 

 made that the natives had no canoes or other navigable craft, but this was not strictly in 

 accordance with the evidence. For example, La Billardiere figured (pi. 46) and Peron 

 described and figured (pi. xiv.) canoes on the south and west coasts made of rolls or strips 

 of bark and bound together by thongs of reeds or grass, which could hold from two to 

 four or five people. Dumont d'Urville saw a raft or catamaran formed of two trunks 

 of trees connected by transverse pieces, which could carry ten people and be propelled by 

 long poles. Craft as above described were used on the rivers, to cross the mouths of 

 the bays which indent the coast, or the narrow channels which separate the mainland 

 from the small islands near the coast, but they would seem too fragile to contend against 

 the strong winds and currents of the Straits of Bass. Bark canoes and rafts somewhat 

 similar in character were also in use amongst the natives of the south and east coasts of 

 Australia. In North Australia, however, where the natives were under the influence of 

 the islanders in Torres Straits and the Papuans of New Guinea, canoes fifty feet long 

 formed by hollowing out the trunk of the cotton tree, capable of holding twelve or fifteen 

 persons and propelled by short paddles, or even a sail formed of palm leaves, were employed.* 

 If Tasmania had been colonised originally by the people of New Guinea or other Oceanic 

 islands, the art of constructing capacious seagoing canoes does not seem to have been 

 transmitted by them to their descendants. But if colonised from Australia, the migration 

 of man had without doubt taken place before the formation of Bass's Straits, along the 

 surface of continuous land, which also served for the passage of the marsupial mammals 

 common to both countries. 



The comparison of the physical characters of the aborigines of Australia with the 

 Tasmanians appropriately forms a subject of consideration. With scarcely an exception 

 the early navigators recognised important differences in their external characters ; 

 similar opinions have been expressed by later observers, and the conclusion has been 

 reached that the existing natives of Australia are distinct from the Tasmanians. In the 

 Australians the hair is black, fairly long, wavy or almost straight ; its shaft is ovoid, 

 relatively thick and not flattened as is the case with the short, woolly, frizzled, finer hair 

 of the Tasmanians, in whom the hair, though sometimes stained red with ochre or even 

 bleached with lime, is usually described as black, though Sydney Hickson has recently 

 stated that it "is of a light golden-brown colour. "t Well-formed beard and moustache 

 were found both in Tasmanians and Australians. In the Australians the skin is a 



* Chapter on Canoes in Brough Smyth's work on the Aborigines of Australia, p. 407, vol. i. 

 t See description in Ling Roth's treatise, p. 226. Is it not likely that Professor Htckson's specimen had been 

 taken from hail that had been bleached? 



