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Rh {| of the Port Essington natives, described by Macgillivray as being four feet in length, and made of the tough hard wood called Wallaru—a kind of gum-tree—the ironbark of New South Wales. The natives fight with them only at close quarters.
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Mr. Suetonius H. Officer informs me that the natives of the Murray, according to their own account, were accustomed to use stone-headed spears. Mr. Officer, however, has seen none. It is not at all improbable that the natives of the Murray procured stone-headed spears from the northern tribes, and they may have made imitations of them. A model of a spear (Fig. 87), said to be from the Far North, has been sent to me by a gentleman well acquainted with native weapons. The head is made of greenstone, and is polished and brought to a fine point. The stone is attached to a long well-shaped spear of hard wood by sinews and gum. The lower end is not hollowed, and it could not therefore be thrown with the Kur-ruk or Womerah. I cannot believe that this spear is in common use. It differs altogether from the spears used by the natives of Port Darwin. All the stone spearheads I have seen have been made by striking off chips. Not one is ground or polished.

The stick by which spears are thrown—Kur-ruk, or Gur-reek (Yarra tribe), Murri-wun (Goulburn tribe), Meera, or Womerah—is shown in several forms in Figs. 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, and 93. Three aspects of Fig. 88 are shown. It is a beautiful implement, and apparently an old one. The details of the