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CHILDREN OF WILD AUSTRALIA

[Illustration: BOY SPEARING FISH]




CHILDREN OF WILD AUSTRALIA

BY

HERBERT PITTS

AUTHOR OF
"THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH"

[Illustration: Decoration]

WITH EIGHT COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON
OLIPHANT, ANDERSON & FERRIER


PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH


                   TO
            DEAR LITTLE MARY
            THIS LITTLE BOOK
                 ABOUT
     THE LITTLE BLACK BOYS AND GIRLS
           OF A FAR-OFF LAND
            IS DEDICATED BY
              HER FATHER




MY DEAR BOYS AND GIRLS,

All the time I have been writing this little book I have been wishing I
could gather you all around me and take you with me to some of the
places in faraway Australia where I myself have seen the little black
children at their play. You would understand so much better all I have
tried to say.

It is a bright sunny land where those children live, but in many ways a
far less pleasant land to live in than our own. The country often grows
very parched and bare, the grass dies, the rivers begin to dry up, and
the poor little children of the wilderness have great difficulty in
getting food. Then perhaps a great storm comes and a great quantity of
rain falls. The rivers fill up and the grass begins to grow again, but
myriads of flies follow and they get into the children's eyes and
perhaps blind some of them, and the mosquitoes come and bite them and
give them fevers sometimes.

Yet though much of the land is wilderness--bare, sandy plains--beautiful
flowers bloom there after the rains. Lovely hibiscus, the giant scarlet
pea, and thousands of delicate white and yellow everlastings are there
for the eyes to feast upon, but the loveliest flowers of all are
frequently the love and tenderness and unselfishness which bloom in the
children's hearts.

I have left Australia now and settled down again in the old homeland,
but the memories of the eight years I spent among the dear little
children out there are still very delightful ones, and they, more than
anything I have read, have helped me to write this little book for you.

Your Sincere friend,

HERBERT PITTS

DOUGLAS, I.O.M., 1914




CONTENTS

CHAP.                                               PAGE
      INTRODUCTORY LETTER                              7

   I. INTRODUCTORY                                    11

  II. PICCANINNIES                                    17

 III. "GREAT-GREAT-GREATEST-GRANDFATHER"              23

  IV. BLACKFELLOWS' "HOMES"                           26

   V. EDUCATION                                       31

  VI. WEAPONS, ETC., WHICH CHILDREN LEARN TO
        MAKE AND USE                                  35

 VII. HOW FOOD IS CAUGHT AND COOKED                   40

VIII. CORROBBOREES, OR NATIVE DANCES                  44

  IX. MAGIC AND SORCERY                               47

   X. SOME STRANGE WAYS OF DISPOSING OF THE DEAD      56

  XI. SOME STORIES WHICH ARE TOLD TO CHILDREN         60

 XII. MORE STORIES TOLD TO CHILDREN                   65

XIII. RELIGION                                        68

 XIV. YARRABAH                                        72

  XV. TRUBANAMAN CREEK                                79

 XVI. SOME ABORIGINAL SAINTS AND HEROES               85

XVII. THE CHOCOLATE BOX                               89




ILLUSTRATIONS


BOY SPEARING FISH           _Frontispiece_

                                      PAGE
HUNTING PARROTS AND COCKATOOS           12

ABORIGINAL CHILDREN AND NATIVE HUT      28

LEARNING TO USE THE BOOMERANG           42

YOUTH IN WAR PAINT                      52

GIRLS' CLASS AT YARRABAH SCHOOL         73

BATHING OFF JETTY AT YARRABAH           78

THE FIRST SCHOOL AT MITCHELL RIVER      84




CHILDREN OF WILD AUSTRALIA




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY


This little book is all about the children of wild Australia--where they
came from, how they live, the weapons they fight with, their strange
ideas and peculiar customs. But first of all you ought to know something
of the country in which they live, whence and how they first came to it,
and what we mean by "wild Australia" to-day, for it is not all
"wild"--very, very far from that.

Australia is a very big country, nearly as large again as India, and no
less than sixty times the size of England without Wales. Nearly half of
it lies within the tropics so that in summer it is extremely hot. There
are fewer white people than there are in London, in fact less than five
millions in all and more than a third of these live in the five big
cities which you will find around the coast, and about a third more in
smaller towns not so very far from the sea. The further you travel from
the coast the more scattered does the white population become, till some
hundred miles inland or more you reach the sheep and cattle country
where the homes of the white men are twenty or even more miles apart.
Further back still lies a vast, and, as far as whites are concerned,
almost unpeopled region into which, however, the squatter is constantly
pushing in search of new pastures for his flocks and herds, and into
which the prospector goes further and further on the look-out for gold.
This country we call in Australia "the Never-Never Land," and it is this
which is wild Australia to-day. It lies mostly in the North and runs
right up to the great central desert. It is there that the aboriginals,
or black people, are found. The actual number of these black people
cannot be exactly ascertained, but there are probably not more than
100,000 of them left to-day.

Much of wild Australia is made up of vast treeless plains and huge
tracts of spinifex (a coarse native grass) and sand. Sometimes in the
North-west one travels miles and miles without seeing a tree except on
the river banks, but in Queensland there is sometimes dense and almost
impenetrable jungle, and mighty, towering trees, with many beautiful
flowering shrubs. All alike is called "bush," which is the general term
in Australia for all that is not town.

The animals of wild Australia are most interesting and numerous. Several
kinds of kangaroo (from the giant "old man," five feet or more in
height, to the tiny little kangaroo mice no larger than our own mice at
home), make their home there, and emus may often be seen running across
the plains. Gorgeous parrots and many varieties of cockatoos are found
in great numbers, snakes are numerous, whilst the rivers and water-holes
teem with fish. Wild dogs, or dingos, too, are very numerous.

[Illustration: HUNTING PARROTS AND COCKATOOS]

For hundreds and hundreds of years the aborigines had this vast country
to themselves, for though Spaniards, like Torres and De Quiros, and
Dutchmen, like Tasman and Dirk Hartog, had visited their shores, and an
Englishman named William Dampier had even landed in the North West in
1688, it was not till exactly a hundred years afterwards that white men
first came to make their homes in their land.

The aborigines are a Dravidian people, and, some think, of the same
parent stock as ourselves. Thousands of years ago, long, long before our
remote ancestors had learned how to build houses, make pottery, till the
soil, or domesticate any animal except the dog--long years, in fact,
before history began, the aboriginals left their primitive home on the
hills of the Deccan and drifting southward in their bark canoes landed
at last on the northern and western shores of the great island
continent. There they found an earlier people with darker skins than
their own and curly hair, very much like the Papuans and Melanesians of
to-day, and they drove them further and further southwards before them
just as our own English forefathers, coming to this land, drove an
earlier people before them into the mountain fastnesses of Wales and
Cumberland and into Cornwall. Some time afterwards came a series of
earthquakes and other disturbances which cut Tasmania away from the
mainland, and there till 1878 that early Papuan people survived.

As the blacks grew more numerous they began to form tribes, and to
divide the country up among themselves. Thus each tribe had its own
hunting-ground to which it must keep and on which no other tribe must
come and settle. But at length the white men came and they