THE AUSTRALIAN RACE.*
WHAT is the Australian race which, isolated on a huge con- tinent for many thousands of years, was never able to evolve a State of the smallest kind, which has no sentiment of nationality, and which apparently has only succeeded in framing and rigorously applying, as its sole achievement, most complicated and astonishing regulations governing marriage? We have read Mr. Cm-r's careful and impartial summary, and the great body of evidence which he has laboriously collected, and we do not see that the Australian has done anything special except devise a system by means of which he prevents the marriage of blood-relations, invent the boomerang proper, the weapon which returns to the thrower, and perhaps the wommera, the simple instrument with which some of the tribes hurl the spear. These are not great conquests in polity and science, and the sum is not greatly augmented even if we add the alleged cure of snake-bites by means of tight ligatures above and below the wound, and the use of the knife, or rather the flint-edge, to drain off the infected blood. What is to be thought of a race which would hunt, trap, and fish, but would not till the ground; which for thousands of years has been dependent upon chance supplies of food, and throughout the whole period, so far as can be inferred from any existing evidence, never sought to provide for the morrow, but lived on from hand to mouth ? If the gifts of Nature had been abundant, this might not be regarded as surprising ; but they were not, and beyond a weir here and there on the rivers, there seems to have been no effort to conquer or even contend with rude Nature. A truly wonderful people, who had in themselves no impulse to rise much above the level of the other animal life surrounding them, and who, when discovered, were, as a race, what they had been for aeons. If they ever attained a less degraded state, the evidence of its existence has disappeared ; and if they did not, it is fair to assume that the representatives of the breed did not belie their forbears.
Mr. Curr's contention is that the Australian race is the product of a cross in which the Negro had a large share, that the family arrived on the continent in this state, and was preserved from change by isolation. The Australian is, con- sequently, not a Negro. He is not black, but copper-coloured, and the children have sometimes light hair. He is a remark- ably hairy man, which the Negro is not, and in other respects he differs from the African; but there are affinities of language, and some marked resemblances between the two. The first pointed out by Mr. Curr is that neither worship God. " Whether the Australian," he says, " has a knowledge of the existence of God, is at least doubtful ; but certainly he has no religious tenets or system of worship." Yet, oddly enough, the Australian fears ghosts, providing they are not too old, for his apprehension, it seems, only extends to the ghosts of the newly dead. He also, like his sable African relative, believes devoutly in sorcery and witchcraft, and apparently in starry influences, but beyond these rudimentary notions his spiritualism does not go. Both races have a similar way of marking the person by incision and not by tattooing ; and each believes that the death of a robust man must have been caused by sorcery ; so that the opinion on the subject of witches " modifies the whole civil code," if such a learned term can be applied to the unwritten law of savages. Then, throughout a great part of the Australian continent—that is, the central tracts—circumcision and some horrible cognate secret practices prevail, upon which we need not dwell. We said that the " Bla,ckfellow " invented a marriage system ; but as something so much like it exists in Africa, if he did not invent his own law, he brought it with him when he reached the continent. In like manner, there are other resemblances of customs, such as knocking out one or more of the front teeth, piercing the nose in order to insert a bone or feather, painting
• The Australian Race its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing in Australia, and the Routes by which it spread itself over that Continent. By Edward M. Carr. 4 vols. Melbourne : John Ferree, Government Printer. London: Trabner and Co. with clay or red ochre, and some methods of burial. Even the law that a man must not see his mother-in-law, nor she him, on any account, finds its counterpart in Africa. The point need not be further pursued. Mr. Curr's conclusion is that " the Australians are a very homogeneous people, with Negro customs and languages, but with hair and colour such as no Negro possesses." And he certainly piles up a good deal of evidence to prove the affinity, despite the physical contradiction.
His theory, as we have said, is that the Australian is a Negro cross, and he gives his reasons for the opinion that the mixed race, at some very remote period, and in no great number, landed in the North-West, not far from Port Darwin, and thence spread in a manner which he elaborately describes throughout the vast island, the several West, Central, and Eastern streams of tribes meeting on the South Coast, at the end of their wanderings in search of land and food, but not fusing, since the distinctive differences of customs still remain. At no time, apparently, could the population of the continent have been large, since the natural supply of subsistence was always relatively, and often absolutely, small, and the limited capacities of the race did not enable them to supplement Nature by labour and art,—that is, to cultivate. North of Torres Straits, the Papuan tills the ground and uses the bow and arrow; south of that narrow waterway, the Australian does neither. He is a man with no thought for the future, even the near future, inferior in that respect to the squirrel, the ant, and the bee. He neither digs nor builds ; he has no numeral higher than, at most, five ; and while he names everything specifically, he has few " collective terms" indicating whole classes ; he has no articles, no infini- tive, no auxiliary verb, no relative pronoun, and no sibilant.
Nevertheless, Mr. Curr points out some excellences in his language not found in any other, although he admits that its defects render precise speech almost impossible. On the whole, the Australian is very low on the scale, but has some points of interest, especially one, indicated by Mr. Curr in this sentence at the end of a long statement. " From these facts," he writes, " I am led to conclude that the Australian race is of vast antiquity, and that, owing to the remarkable isolation to which it has been subjected, it has preserved more of the customs, linguistic peculiarities, and ways of thought of the Black races of antiquity than any other people now existing on the globe ; and that hence, if we would realise what the earliest Black savages were like, we must study the Australian before he passes away." For he is departing fast before the rifle, the diseases, and the reckless energy of the White man, who, it is plain, as he cannot absorb, will gradually extinguish this relic of an older world left so long segregated in the Southern seas.
Whether, if the continent had been kept in permanent relations with the rest of the world like Africa, the race would have improved, or whether it is of a kind which cannot go beyond a certain low level, must now be mere matter for speculation. Mr. Curr found the children brought to the mission and Government stations quicker in learning than English children, but wanting in solidity and perseverance.
He thought that all their acquirements would vanish if they were transferred to the bush, as happened in some cases ; and it was found that Blacks, previously instructed in agriculture, to whom cottages had been given would not cultivate the gardens and fields attached to their homes. But we read that one of his vocabularies was written out by a native trooper of the mounted police, who is thus described :—" He spends his time reading novels and newspapers, has built himself a little house and detached kitchen, has a bed set on posts, and has become so civilised that he has lost the faculty of tracking and other accomplishments of aboriginal life." Here is a promising exception, and it seems that he had comrades, though none so distinguished. The result of our contact with the Blacks is thus summed up :- " The only success which our treatment of them has had is in the cultivation of their intellects ; and if their education [at mission and other stations] is persevered with for several genera- tions, I see no reason to prevent their being brought to a level with ourselves. In bodily health they have conspicuously receded. Their state of dependence on us has undermined their former self- reliance, and left them without character. Religion and civilisa- tion our Blacks have not attained."
But surely the paragraph is somewhat inconsistent, for the European level cannot be attained unless the moral qualities are developed,—one might almost say, brought into being. Education should not, though it sometimes does, injure health ; but it should never undermine self-reliance. The inference is that the wine is too strong for the bottles. And that seems to have been the opinion of an extremely intelligent Roman Catholic missionary, who preferred giving his young people physical work, but even then in moderation, seeing, as he remarks, that the aborigines "cannot stand, at once, not even' our food, much less our daily hard work, be it mental or physical." In fact, the attempts to civilise the race do not seem to have met with much success, despite the example of the trooper. The Colonial Governments have collected some on Reserves, and great pains have been taken, with these results, in Victoria :— " The Blacks on these Reserves have easily been induced to give up murder, cannibalism (to which they were never much addicted), and polygamy. As regards religion and morality, passing over a little outward show, it seems to me that they do not exist among them ; and though these Blacks have been among us for forty years, and many of them have been born and brought up on our missionary stations, I am convinced that, were they once more returned to their forests and cut off from communication with the Whites, they would in a single lifetime become exactly what we originally found them."
That is not the language of hope ; but there is ample material in these well-stored volumes on which the student can base a judgment for himself. We may part with them by extracting a traditional account of the Deluge, which, if the story were not tragic, we should be inclined to say showed a sense of humour in " the Blackfellow." It was current in Gippsland :- " Ages ago, there was no water in what are now lakes, rivers, and seas, known to the Kurnai (a name which seems to have in- cluded all the tribes of Gippsland), for an immense frog had swallowed up the whole of it. This state of things, it appears, was a source of great discomfort to the animals generally, and especially to the fishes ; so they held a consultation on the subject, and came to the conclusion that the only remedy was to make the frog laugh, and that if this could be accomplished, there would soon be plenty of water. To give effect to this idea, every animal presented him- self before the frog in the most ludicrous postures he could assume, and went through his funniest antics. For a time, however, they were unsuccessful, until the eel stood upon the tip of his tail, which so tickled the frog that he literally burst with laughing, and the water poured from him in such vast streams that there was presently a deluge, and all the Blacks would have been drowned had not one of them, Loon by name, made a large canoe, in which he saved a great many."
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