Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/80

 implied by this question with a ray of triumph. He does make use of a canoe, tiny as its structure is, and one of the spoils collected by Stuart was a small native canoe model. The Australian can probably claim to have fashioned and navigated a canoe of his own, independently of the example of the superior vessels that are constructed by the more intelligent races adjoining the northern coasts. Some of his customs are curious. How came he to practise the rite of circumcision? Our travellers allude to this rite as observed in the South, but not in the North. Leichhardt, however, expressly states that it was practised by all the tribes he met with in the year 1845, around the Gulf of Carpentaria. The knocking out of two or four of the upper front teeth as a sign of adult manhood is very general, although not universal.

The accounts given us of the natives, their friendly, mischievous, or hostile purposes, are somewhat various and contradictory. They have evidently the Japanese quality of a dislike to be intruded upon by outside and unknown barbarians, with their sickly unnatural skins, and their uncouth, anomalous, unkangaroo-looking attendant quadrupeds. Our travellers and their temporary camps, it is evident, were repeatedly in the way of the natives, disturbing their fishing and their other arrangements. To conduct amicable