208 
PHYSICAL APPEARANCE. 
other savages the Australian looks upon his wife as 
a slave. To her belongs the duty of collecting and 
preparing the daily food, of making the camp or 
hut for the night, of gathering and bringing in fire- 
wood, and of procuring water. She must also 
attend to the children ; and in travelling carry all 
the moveable property and frequently the weapons 
of her husband. In wet weather she attends to all 
the outside work, whilst her lord and master is 
snugly seated at the fire. If there is a scarcity of 
food she has to endure the pangs of hunger, often, 
perhaps, in addition to ill-treatment or abuse. No 
wonder, then, that the females, and especially the 
younger ones, (for it is then they are exposed to the 
greatest hardships,) are not so fully or so roundly 
developed in person as the men. Yet under all 
these disadvantages this deficiency does not always 
exist. Occasionally, though rarely, I have met with 
females in the bloom of youth , whose well-proportioned 
limbs and symmetry of figure might have formed a 
model for the sculptor’s chisel. In personal appear- 
ance the females are, except in early youth, very far 
inferior to the men. When young, however, they 
are not uninteresting. The jet-black eyes, shaded 
by their long, dark lashes, and the delicate and 
scarcely-formed features of incipient womanhood 
give a soft and pleasing expression to a countenance 
that might often be called good-looking — occasion- 
ally even pretty. 
The colour of the skin, both in the male and 
