Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/256

 retain the juices of the meat, which would otherwise be dried up by their simple mode of cookery; but as soon as the animal is sufficiently done, the skin is easily pulled off, and rejected. The MacLeay river natives always clean and gut their fish, and cook them carefully on hot embers, and they eat nothing whatever in a raw state, except cobberra and grubs. The Australian Aborigines, therefore, though not remarkably scrupulous as to cleanliness, are, at least, equally so with the less uncivilized New Zealanders, and much more so than many of the African tribes; and their food is, at any rate, not of a more revolting nature than that of other uncivilized communities, such as the blubber and train oil of the Esquimaux, fish in the last stage of putrefaction, which are relished beyond all other food by the Samoyeds, the uncooked horse-flesh of some of the Tartar tribes, and the heterogeneous rubbish devoured by the Boshiesmen, who have even been known to roast and eat the old cast-away shoes of the Dutch boors. So dainty were the blacks at the MacLeay, that I knew them refuse to take any of the flesh of a bullock in fine condition, which was accidentally killed in the bush.

The MacLeay river tribes do not practise so much brutality towards the women as I have seen in other parts of the colony. The girls, as they become marriageable, are either taken by men of the same tribe, or else are sometimes given to those of the neighbouring tribes at the close of some corroberree,