Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/29

24 may be quite correct as regards white men, but not being in accordance with aboriginal ethics, and never having been practised by any of their progenitors, they cannot see why they should (merely because a white man bids them) ignore that which their forefathers deemed good from the very earliest times, and which they themselves feel to be innate. Of course, to arguments of this kind, and so put, especially when your opponent is an untaught and nearly unteachable savage, there is no possibility of reply. We can therefore only shrug our shoulders and pity the poor, ignorant child of nature.

Much of this absence of chastity is due to the promiscuous manner they have of huddling up together in their loondthals, and to the coarse, obscene, and lewd character of the stories in listening to which they spend so much of their time round the camp fires at night. All their facetiæ, too, are of the same broad, gross nature. Were they not so they would fail to meet with the appreciative audiences which silently sit for hours together, with mouths agape, drinking in the foul pruriency of the savage story-teller. When we consider that all these descriptions of lewd tales, and their accompanying gross facetiæ are retailed in the presence of the children, it can scarcely be matter for wonder that they should grow up into men and women possessing but hazy notions concerning chastity and its many beauties. It frequently happens that two brothers-in-law fall out and quarrel. If the difference becomes serious, the first thing they do is—each sends off his wife to her brother, thus getting back their respective sisters. The fact of their each