Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/124

119 They consider the Murray River the largest flowing volume of water in the world, and that it is without either beginning or end. They further deem the water of the Murray the sweetest, and the fish thereof the best and fattest in the universe. The sea is only considered by them to be an immense lake of cawie kayanie (salt water). They have not the remotest notion how or why it ebbs and flows; nor have they the faintest idea of its vastness, or that Australia is merely one of its countless islands.

Their total ignorance of these matters is most singular, as we would have imagined that their ngallawatows (postmen) would at least (in their continual intercourse with the various tribes with whom their bartering proclivities brought them in contact) have gained some notions on the subject less crude than those which they possess.

In astronomical subjects, however, their annals are less barren, but this fact does not offer much room for astonishment, as their continuous outdoor existence brings them daily, as well as nightly, face to face with the celestial luminaries, and as they are entirely dependent upon the sun for light, whilst foraging for their required sustenance and for guidance during their manifold wanderings, they note his motions and aspects with as much interest and anxiety as mariners do.

As a matter of course they imagine that it is the sun which travels from east to west, and so causes daylight and darkness as well as the changes of the season; they have not the least idea that it is the earth's motions which effect these changes, and when we have endeavoured to explain these phenomina [sic] to them they have gravely shaken their