Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/140

104 grass, and enquired what she was seeking. Her companions replied, to my surprise, A needle. To this I answered, that I had often heard hopeless search compared to "seeking a needle in a bottle of hay," and A. Cottrell, who sat by, said, You will see she will find it: you have no idea how keen sighted and persevering they are; and after some time she picked up her needle, which was one of English manufacture, and not of large size!

These people not only smear their bodies with red ochre and grease, but sometimes rouge the prominent parts tastefully with the former article, and they draw lines, that by no means improve their appearance, with a black, glittering, mineral, probably an ore of antimony, above and below their eyes.—One day we noticed a woman arranging several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines. These we learned represented absent friends, and. one larger than the rest, a corpulent woman on Flinders Island, known by the name of Mother Brown.—The arithmetic of the Aborigines is very limited, amounting only to one, two, plenty. As they cannot state in numbers the amount of persons present on any occasion, they give their names.—The west coast being very humid, those inhabiting it make huts for winter habitations, by clearing a circular area in a thicket of slender, young, Tea-tree, and drawing the tops of the surrounding bushes together, and thatching these with branches and grass. Sometimes for temporary shelter, they use large slabs of bark, from some of the Gum-trees.

Each tribe of the Aborigines is divided into several families, and each family, consisting of a few individuals, occupies its own fire. Though they rarely remain two days in a place, they seldom travel far at a time. Each tribe keeps much to its own district—a circumstance that may in some measure account for the variety of dialect. The tribe called by the settlers, the Ben Lomond tribe, occupied the north-east portion of V. D. Land; that called, the Oyster Bay tribe, the south-east; the Stony Creek tribe, the middle portion of the country; and the Western tribe, the west coast. Besides these, there were also a few smaller sections. Those on the