Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/376

352 "In my younger days I owned a station in a region where the blacks were numerous, and though they occasionally stole some of my sheep and cattle, and committed other depredations, our relations were, on the whole, of a friendly character. I allowed them to visit my house, but only on condition that they were properly dressed, the dress consisting of a skin or piece of cloth around the waist. As a single garment lasted them a long time, it was evident that they wore it only when coming to my house, laying it aside as soon as they were out of sight. When going into battle they paint their bodies with red earth, to give them a hideous appearance, and if they can obtain European paints of different colors they are especially happy; they imagine that the more hideously they are decorated the more likely are they to be victorious in fights with other tribes.

"Like most other savage people, they obtain fire by rubbing two sticks together; but the operation requires so much exertion that they take great care to preserve fire when once they have obtained it. A tribe will wander about for days and weeks carrying fire in coals carefully protected by strips of bark; some of the old women are designated as fire-carriers, and are generally exempt from other work. When they build fires at night they surround them with shields of bark, so that their locality will not be revealed by the glare of light.

"They use columns of smoke by day, and fires by night, for conveying intelligence. They have a very good telegraphic code by columns of smoke, which can be made to indicate warnings, the position of game, ships or whales in sight along the coast, and various other things. They can make smoke signals that will be understood by their own or friendly tribes, but be unintelligible to hostile ones. In former times they used this smoke signal occasionally to the injury of the white settlers, who had at first no idea that the thin column of smoke rising through the trees was a signal for the warriors to make a simultaneous attack upon half a dozen places at once."