The natives around Port Jackson and in the Illawara district have, generally speaking, little of the aboriginal about them, and their abject misery and addiction to drink make them pitiable and disgusting objects; for their present hopeless state is in great measure attributable to their contact with civilization, which has made them neither intelligent nor industrious. The natives, however, of the banks of the Murray, Clarence, and Brisbane rivers, though of the same race, are of a very different appearance. They keep up the habits of their ancestors, and seldom come in contact with civilization, and even then only with its pioneers, the squatters and shepherds. Among these the customs of circumcision and unlimited polygamy are universal, each man having as many wives as he can steal or support. Owing, however, to their nomad life, this system is practised to but a limited extent. Infanticide, especially of female children, is of very frequent occurrence. Abortion is also so frequently practised that they have a word (_Mibra_) to express it! On the other hand, we read in Count Strzelecki's valuable work that "the female natives after illicit commerce with a white man become barren for their own race," which, according to all unbiased observers, is a complete delusion. In no part of Australia do the natives cultivate the soil. Nomad as is their mode of life, they live almost exclusively on the products of the chase, or of the deep, according as they live in the interior or on the coast. Lizards, snakes, and insects, and some few roots and resinous substances, form the delicacies of their primitive cookery. Their dwellings are either natural cavities in the rock, or a few pieces of bark fixed into the ground at either end, and arched upwards in the middle. Throughout New South Wales the custom prevails, when a native dies young, of burying him under a shallow mound of earth, only the elders possessing the privilege of being consumed with fire. In the latter case the corpse of the deceased, with his hunting and fishing implements, is placed on a pile of dry wood about three feet high, with his face towards the rising sun. This is covered by the surviving relatives with straw and wood, who then set fire to the funeral pyre. Some days later the ashes and calcined bones are collected and burnt. The name of the dead is never again pronounced, any individual of the same tribe, who may also happen to bear it, being compelled to exchange it for another.