Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia — Volume 2Sturt, Charles
History
Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia — Volume 2
Sturt, Charles
New South Wales -- Discovery and exploration; Sturt, Charles, 1795-1869
either during a hunting excursion, or whilst absent from his tribe, he
returns under a feeling of conscious guilt, and by his manner betrays
his guilt, sitting apart from the men, and confessing his misdemeanour
to the chief at the first interrogation, upon which he is obliged to
undergo a slight punishment. This evidently is a law of policy and
necessity, for if the emus were allowed to be indiscriminately
slaughtered, they would soon become extinct. Civilised nations may
learn a wholesome lesson even from savages, as in this instance of
their forebearance. For somewhat similar reasons, perhaps, married
people alone are here permitted to eat ducks. They hold their
corrobories, (midnight ceremonies), and sing the same melancholy ditty
that breaks the stillness of night on the shores of Jervis' Bay, or on
the banks of the Macquarie; and during the ceremony imitate the several
birds and beasts with which they are acquainted. If these inland tribes
differ in anything from those on the coast, it is in the mode of
burying their dead, and, partially, in their language. Like all
savages, they consider their women as secondary objects, oblige them to
procure their own food, or throw to them over their shoulders the bones
they have already picked, with a nonchalance that is extremely amusing;
and, on the march, make them beasts of burden to carry their very
weapons. The population of the Morumbidgee, as far as we had descended
it at this time, did not exceed from ninety to a hundred souls. I am
persuaded that disease and accidents consign many of them to a
premature grave.
MIRAGE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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