HORN EXPEDITION-ANTHROPOLOGY. 
83 
and Alice Springs, all of which, it will be observed, are settlements of the whites 
either for pastoral or telegraphic purposes. Their camps are frequently situated in 
a river bed the soft sand of such localities being, no doubt, the attraction. Our 
experience, however, of the extreme cold of the relatively low-lying river-beds led 
us to select in preference the higher, if harder, ground of their banks. As 
frequently happens in the dry regions of Australia it is the advantages offered by 
the presence of permanent water that has been the prime inducement to select a 
particular locality for a settlement both by whites and blacks, and in the case of 
the latter, the presence of the white man offers additional inducements in the way 
of gifts or unconsidered trifles of food. 
During the day many of the men are away on their hunting expeditions, and 
the women in search of vegetable food, but still we always found a good many of 
both sexes in camp all day—the men almost invariably idling, but the women 
often engaged in grinding seeds. As we found them, under these circumstances, 
they were usually to be seen scattered about in small groups, the adult men by 
themselves and apart from similar groups of women and children, there being, how¬ 
ever, relatively few of the latter. 
As Mr. Gillen points out elsewhere the etiquette of the camp is strict in the 
matter of separation of the sexes, as well as in that of the assignment of special 
limits to the different social divisions. No one can avoid noticing the separation 
of the sexes, but it requires some knowledge of the constitution of the group to 
recognise the delimitations of the social divisions, and I must refer the reader to 
Mr. Gillen’s remarks on this matter. 
At Crown Point and the Mission Station, a few low and imperfect shelters of 
boughs or salsola bushes thrown together gave very little protection against the 
weather. At Alice Springs these shelters were somewhat more carefully constructed 
and their efiiciency consequently improved, but at Tempe Downs the natives slept 
without a vestige of either shelter or covering, and this at a time when the night 
temperature sometimes fell below 20° F. In some localities, such as Gill’s Range 
and the Mission Station, we found abandoned habitations of a better class con¬ 
structed of boughs with sufficient care to afford considerable protection, but at the 
latter place, as already stated, the natives preferred to use their almost shelterless 
camps in the bed of the river. At night the single individuals, male or female, 
sleep side by side, in their separate camps, with a small fire between each body, 
which is kept burning all night. I often noticed that natives would rathei’ get 
up in the night-time to gather a fresh supply of wood than take the trouble to 
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