Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/126

 recorded by Mr. Gideon S. Lang, who saw a native detect, without alighting from his horse, the name of the person whose footprint was on the road. Such occurrences were common. It was on the rock, the scanty lichen, or hard and barren places, that the tracker made his white companions wonder.

The reputation of courage and skill in war was the chief object of ambition. The pre-eminent man usually took several wives. Wives were sometimes given away. The husband had unrestrained power over them and his children. The women were drudges in the tribe; they carried burdens. They were at best treated with contemptuous kindness, and often brutally. The husband was a law to himself; but there were instances of affection which redeemed human nature from the cruelty of the system. Children were generally treated kindly, but sometimes were put to death in early infancy to shake off useless burdens. Cannibalism was known in some tribes, but was abhorred in others. When resorted to, it was with secrecy and mysterious eagerness, as if the appetite were sharpened by a superstition as to supernatural results. It was sometimes unjustly imputed, when white men, driving the natives from their camps, found human hands preserved in nets. They were thought to be morsels for food, but they were the trophies of success, carried by the Australian as the scalp of his enemy was carried by the Cherokee. Custom varied so much in different tribes that a hand was carried as a memorial of a lost friend in some places.

Burial ceremonies differed in various districts. In some places graves were carefully dug with sticks; the body, wrapped at full length in bark of the melaleuca, was, amidst wailings and cutting of flesh by the women, buried with the property of the deceased. At other places bodies were interred in different postures. Some tribes exposed their dead on small trees, on which they had made a platform for the purpose. Some constructed a low platform, supported by stakes and forked branches. Some placed the body in the hollow of a tree, some in a cave. The mourning for a chieftain or distinguished warrior was intense and prolonged. For the young or undistinguished little display of grief was evinced, and sometimes there was utter indiffer-