The visitors usually so time their steps as to arrive at the camp some two or three hours before sunset. When the principal man gives warning, they all sit down, and they remain quiet for the space of half an hour or more. The influential Aborigines from each tribe then approach and confer respecting the business to be transacted. If it is a friendly visit, or for the purpose of procuring wives, or for arranging plans of any kind likely to be mutually beneficial, they enter the camp, and everywhere are heard kindly greetings, lamentations for those departed since they last met, and enquiries respecting relatives and others. The visitors immediately after form an encampment at some little distance from their friends.
When, in accordance with some arrangements suggested by the old men of the tribes, and approved by the warriors, a strange tribe is invited to come into a district which they have not previously visited, there are some practices to be observed, the omission of which might lead to quarrels. The strangers are preceded and introduced by members of some tribe having relations both with the strangers and with the tribe that is about to receive them. The duty of those who have to introduce the strangers is something like that which devolves on a master of ceremonies. Both parties must be consulted by them, and their wishes ascertained, before any attempt is made to bring the tribes together. The responsibility of the introduction, to a great extent, rests on the members of the intermediate tribe. If all difficulties be removed, the strange tribe is permitted to approach the camp—the metropolis of what to them is a new country.
The strangers carry lighted bark or burning sticks in their hands, for the purpose, they say, of clearing and purifying the air. Their entertainers make them welcome, first to the forest lands of which they are the owners; then to the trees, from which they cut boughs and present them to their visitors; then to the shrubs, of which they gather bundles and offer to them; and then to the grass and the herbs, which are freely spread before them; and the boughs and the branches and the leaves and the grass are symbols of friendship which are well understood by all—the givers and the receivers.
To each family is appropriated a separate seat, which is usually a dead prostrate tree. At one end sits the head of the family, with his sons next to him in the order of their birth; at the other, his principal wife, with the other wives and the female children. Two fires are made, one at each end of the log, and at these the males and the females warm themselves and cook their food without interference with each other.
During the first day the visitors are not permitted to minister to their own wants in any way. A male amongst the entertainers fills a Tarnuk with water, and carries it to the head of the family, and, looking at him fixedly, stirs the water with a reed or a twig, and takes a deep draught of it, thus satisfying him that it is good, and then leaves it for the use of him and his sons. A female does the same office for the strange wives and the female children.
Food, consisting of all the varieties which the country affords, is laid before the guests. They carry to them the kangaroo, the opossum, the bandicoot, and the bear, birds of several kinds, fish and eels, and the native bread and gum.
