Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/139

1832.] this country Mutton-fish, are met with abundantly. These are often taken in deep water by the native women, who dive for them, and force them from the rocks by means of a wooden chisel. They put them into an oval bag, and bring them up suspended round their necks.

While we were at Woolnorth, a party of the domesticated Blacks, who had been with G. A. Robinson, on the west coast, arrived from Barren Island, under charge of Anthony Cottrell, G. A. Robinson's assistant. A woman of this party was the sole relick of a tribe that inhabited the western side of the Huon River, on the south coast. I enquired of her what became of the people of her country. She answered, They all died. I then asked what killed them. An aged man of the Bruny Island tribe, who is one of their doctors, and was sitting by, replied, The Devil. I desired to know how he managed. The woman began to cough violently, to show me how they were affected, and she said, that when the rest were all dead, she made a "catamoran," a sort of raft, and crossed D'Entrecasteaux Channel to Bruny Island, and joined a tribe there.

The old Doctor was smeared and streaked with red ochre and grease, with which his beard was also dressed: he is affected with fits of spasmodic contraction of the muscles of one breast, which he attributes, as they do all other diseases, to the devil; and he is cunning enough to avail himself of the singular effect produced upon him by this malady, to impose upon his country people, under the idea of satanic inspiration. When it comes on, he seizes a stick out of the fire, and brandishes it about him, in the manner that is common under circumstances of rage among this people. The Doctor had his instruments lying by him, consisting of pieces of broken glass, picked up on the shore; with these he cuts deep gashes in any part affected with pain.

One day, when sitting by the fire of the natives, watching a woman making the oval bags of open work, used in fishing, &c. of the leaves of a sedgy plant, which she split with great dexterity, and after having divided them into strips of proper width, softened by drawing through the fire, I observed another woman looking carefully about among the