Page:Aboriginesofvictoria01.djvu/38

xxx this respect the Gippsland blacks differ from the people of the Murray. They will keep a body eight or ten days, or even longer. They will keep it until all their friends can be got together, so that the last duties may be performed with some pomp and ceremony. The Gippsland blacks differ from the Murray blacks in another matter. The blacks of the Murray never keep anything belonging to the dead — always burying the property of the dead man in the grave which they have dug for his body; the Gippsland people keep the relics of the departed. They will cut off the hands to keep as a remembrance, and these they will attach to the string that is tied round the neck. It is said also that they will sometimes keep the head; but this custom is not common.

When mourning for the dead, the women plaster their bodies and the men smear their faces with pipeclay. White is not always used. Black, and in some places red, indicate mourning. Ordinarily, a woman laments the death of her husband, and uses the clay appropriate to her condition for about six months; after the lapse of that time she may marry again. A widow on the Murray is called Mam-ban-ya-purno, and in Gippsland, Wow-a-lak. On the Lower Murray and elsewhere the widows plaster their heads with a white paste made of powdered gypsum; and the white caps seen by Mitchell were discarded emblems of mourning.

When any one dies, his miam or wurley is pulled down, and the materials are often burnt. No one will inhabit a place where a death has occurred. I have mentioned, in the chapter devoted to a description of the modes of burial common amongst the Australians, some few instances wherein their practices agree with those of other savages, but many more might be given; and here — as in their language, their modes of ornamenting their weapons, the treatment of their infants, their marriage customs, and their myths — there is so much which is undoubtedly truly indigenous, and arising wholly out of their condition and the physical forces by which they are moved, that is yet like what is seen in other parts of the world, that one has cause to regret again and again that no one has, up to the present time, placed the facts in order, and set down after a system and under proper heads all that is known of savages — in what respects they agree, in what they differ, and to what extent they resemble in their customs the people amongst whom civilization was born and nurtured, and to whom we owe the advancement which modern society so proudly regards as the results of its own efforts. Such a work — and it would not necessarily be at first a very large one — would do much to help towards a better understanding of man's actual duties and responsibilities; and let us hope it will be undertaken by some one who has the ability to construct a system and to use the details in subordination to it.

The encampments of the natives, and indeed all their movements, are ordered by the old men. They do not wander about aimlessly: there is order and method in what they do; and when several tribes meet, the sites for the miams are selected in accordance with rules, the arrangement generally being such as to show exactly from what direction each tribe has come.

In some parts of the continent their dwellings are large and well built; stout poles are used in their construction, and they are thatched with grass.