Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/159

 direction, and the discrepancy can only be reconciled, by supposing a division and dispersion of the original natives to have taken place at a period sufficiently remote, to have given time for these languages to have sprung up subsequently, and that the inventions alluded to having been discovered previous to this event, the knowledge of them had been handed down from father to son to the present generation. The following sketch, then, may be considered as applicable, with very slight differences, to the natives of the entire island.

The aborigines of Australia are in general of slight frame, and rather low stature. They are, however, active and well made. Their faces are, with few exceptions, very ugly; the brow overhanging the forehead villainous low, and also narrow; the nose broad at bottom, and ill-formed; the lips large and fleshy; the mouth wide; teeth large and flat, and the whole character of the face sensual, without being voluptuous. Their colour is a brownish black; their hair is long and straight, yet soft and thick, and most of the men have good beards and moustachoes, which, however the wild tribes near Portland Bay pluck out by the roots. But the quality which does most to redeem this otherwise forbidding picture, is an expression of good-humour and light-heartedness which is very prevalent amongst them.