Page:Australian race - vol 1.djvu/27

 parts, as the Sydney and Manēra languages have much in common. Hence the difficulty of making themselves understood was what the first inquirers had to contend with: our difficulty in the old settled districts is that the languages, like the tribes, are now but mixed remnants.

In connection with mis-translations, one not unfrequently meets with arguments based on such foundations. One instance occurs in Jukes' Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, vol. 2, p. 317, where the author gives porene as the Pine Gorine (e.g., Bangerang) equivalent for arm, instead of borinya.

A few words must also be said concerning the map in Vol. IV., in which the positions occupied by the various tribes are shown. As our Blacks do not mark the boundaries of tribal territories, or determine them with any exactness even on river frontages where land is the most valuable for their purposes, and as they have very loose ideas concerning them in the unwatered spaces which intervene between the rivers and creeks, no accuracy in mapping is possible. The writer's practice in this matter has been to learn as far as practicable the principal geographical features embraced by the territory of a tribe, and to surround them on the map with a line. Frequently there is a space between the acknowledged lands of two tribes the ownership of which remains doubtful. The width of such lands seems to vary from half-a-mile in good country to twenty miles in poor districts. There are also waterless areas of 100 miles or more across, which are quite uninhabitable. When questioned by our people on the subject of their territorial possessions, the members of a tribe will not unfrequently in these days describe as theirs, lands to which their ancestors made no claim, in consequence of which the boundaries of tribal lands, as described by the writer's correspondents,