meat begins to prevail. If the tribe has travelled far—say fifteen or sixteen miles—and the men are very hungry, the cooking process is conducted hurriedly; and the women and children are prompt in delivering the roots, tubers, and fruits they have gathered on their journey.
As a rule, they are lazy travellers. They have no motive to induce them to hasten their movements. It is generally late in the morning before they start on their journey, and there are many interruptions by the way. If they are wandering through a tract where there is much game, the women and children are left to the guidance of only two or three of the men, the rest rambling from spot to spot, holding their weapons ready for slaughter, and hunting keenly in every likely place. At such times, though the native mind is probably not much impressed with the aspects of the landscape, the effect on a stranger who comes suddenly in sight of the hunters is strong. To see them stalking through the forest with their spears in their hands, now in the deep shades and sunless depths of some cleft in the mountains, where their forms are only occasionally visible, as they pass through the thick undergrowth of shrubs, or beneath the broad green shelter of the tree-ferns—or, again, as they ascend some steep slope, with their faces towards the sun; their dark figures bronzed by the strong light as they move in the sheen of the low fern, whose leaves, reflecting the rays of the sun, make the bank a bath of molten silver, in which they seem to wade—to see them thus, or when stepping from the gloom of the forest into the lights which fall through the scanty foliage of some of the gums, is a picture which cannot be easily described, nor, once seen, forgotten.
When the miams are built, the fires lighted, the roasting and eating quite done, and their family affairs settled to their satisfaction, the men, women, and children give themselves up to amusements, or employ themselves in light labors. The old men hold grave converse, the warriors and younger men attend to the repairs of their weapons and implements, the women chatter together, the lads romp on the grass or amidst the fern, or practise themselves in useful exercises, and the girls and very young children gather such food as they can find on the ground or in the dead timber.
The forest that an hour before was silent, or echoed only the infrequent notes of the bell-bird, or rung with the weird "ha! ha!" and "hoo! hoo!" of the laughing jackass, is now peopled with happy families. Its aspect is changed. Great trunks have had the bark stripped off, branches have been broken, notches appear where the hunter has climbed, and the smoke of the fires rising slowly through the branches of the tall trees tells the wanderer afar off that the tribe is encamped.
Each little miam is built partly of bark and partly of boughs, or wholly of bark or wholly of boughs, according to the state of weather or the whim of the builder.[1]
- ↑ The late Mr. Thomas believed that at one time, in some districts of the Colony of Victoria, the natives built and inhabited huts of a much more substantial character than the ordinary bark miams. His belief was based on information received from one of the earliest settlers in the Western district, who said he saw a native village on the banks of a creek, about fifty miles to the north-east of Port Fairy, composed of twenty or thirty huts, some of them capable of holding
