Page:Dawson - Australian aborigines (1900).djvu/25

Rh A departure from this primitive mode of covering, and the adoption of the white man's costume, have weakened the constitution of the aborigines, and rendered them very liable to colds and pulmonary diseases, more particularly as — though they overload themselves with European clothes during the daytime — they seldom sleep under their rugs, excepting in the cold season of the year.

Fur rugs were very scarce and valuable before the white man destroyed the wild dogs, the natural enemies of the opossum and kangaroo, as it took a year to collect opossum skins sufficient to make one. The ring-tailed opossums were more plentiful than the common kind, but the skins were less esteemed. Rugs were also made of the skins of the wallaby and of the brush kangaroo, which are likewise inferior to the common opossum. A good rug is made of from fifty to seventy skins, which are stripped off the opossum, pegged out square or oblong on a sheet of bark, and dried before the fire, then trimmed with a reed knife, and sewn together with the tail sinews of the kangaroo, which are always pulled out of the tail, and carefully dried and saved for thread. Previous to sewing the skins together, diagonal lines, about half-an-inch apart, are scratched across the flesh side of each with sharpened mussel shells. This is done to make them soft and pliable. The only addition to this kind of ornamentation is occasionally the figure of an emu in the centre skin of the rug. It may be stated that, although many of the opossum rugs of the aborigines are now ornamented with a variety of designs, some of which are coloured, nothing but the simple pattern previously described, with the occasional figure of an emu, was used before the arrival of the white man. The figures of human beings, animals, and things, now drawn by the natives, and represented in works on the aborigines of the colony of Victoria as original, were unknown to the tribes treated of, and are considered by them as of recent introduction by Europeans.