Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/25

 INTRODUCTION. xv The prevalence of infanticide seems to have been due solely to the desire to avoid the trouble of rearing children, and to enable the woman to follow her husband about in his wanderings, which she could not do if encumbered with a child. The first three or four are often killed, and no distinction appears to have been made between males and females. Half-caste children are almost always destroyed.* The practice prevailed long before the Europeans came to South Australia, and in one tribe (the Narrinyeri) more than half of the children born were sacrificed in this way. One intelligent native woman is reported to have said, that if the Europeans had waited a few years more they would have found the country without inhabitants.† What became of these little unfortunates? In some cases the bodies were burned, in others they were eaten. One instance at least is known to the writer, where the mother admitted that her infant had been eaten. Other cases have been mentioned, but are not sufficiently authenticated to justify special notice. Amongst the Dieyerie tribe cannibalism is the universal practice, and all who die are indiscriminately devoured. Amongst this tribe there are distinct rules as to those who are entitled to partake of the loathsome banquet. For instance, the mother eats the flesh of her children, and the children that of their mother. Brothers and sisters in law eat of each other’s flesh, and the same privilege is allowed to uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, grandfathers and mothers, as well as grandchildren, who eat of each other. The only restriction seems to be that fathers do not eat the flesh of their own children, nor that of their fathers’ children.‡ Eyre gives it as his opinion that cannibalism is not common, but only occasionally practised by some tribes. He states, however, that to enable them to become sorcerers amongst the tribes around Adelaide, they have at one period to eat the flesh of young children, and at another that of an old man; but it does not appear to him that they partake of each kind more than once in their lifetime. That it is not common now, or rather that it does
 * Eyre. † Taplin, page 13. ‡ Gason.