as that described by Mr. Gideon S. Lang, must surely result in a change in the opinion that is generally entertained of their character and mental faculties.
In hunting the kangaroo the native employs various methods. He tracks him day after day and night after night until he secures him, or, hidden by an artificial screen of boughs, he spears him as he comes to drink at a water-hole; or he digs a pit for him, or catches him with other animals by setting fire to the bush in various places until the scared creatures are surrounded by a circle of flames, when they are easily speared or knocked on the head with a club.
Fastening the skin and feathers of a hawk to the end of a long stick, and uttering the cry of the hawk, he startles the wallaby, which at once takes refuge in the nearest bush, and is there speared. By the appearance of a hair or two, or a few grains of sand, or the faint scratch of a claw, on the bark of a tree, he knows whether or not the opossum is in his hole, and, if there, he rapidly climbs the tree and catches him. He works harder than a navvy when he is employed in digging out the wombat. In netting and noosing ducks, in swimming to a flock, either under water, breathing through a reed, or with his head covered with aquatic plants, he displays as much cunning as a North American Indian. Holding a few boughs in front of him, and carrying a long stick with a butterfly and a noose at the end, he walks up to a turkey and snares him.
The native makes a bower, and, using one bird as a decoy, he snares numbers of small birds during the course of a day. Holding a piece of fish in his hand, and lying as if asleep, he entices the hawk or the crow, and by a quick movement catches it. One black will approach a tree, on a limb of which a bird is sitting, and by singing and by strange motions of his hands and contortions of his body (always keeping his eyes fixed on the bird) so completely engage its attention that another black will be able to ascend the tree and knock the bird down with a stick.
He is active in the water. He will attack the green-turtle in the sea, and, avoiding the sharp edges of the shell, turn it on its back and drag it to his canoe. Like the people of the coasts of China and the Mozambique, he uses the fisher-fish—the Echeneis—in taking the hawk's-bill turtle, thus verifying the observation of Columbus. He catches and cooks poisonous snakes as well as the harmless frog. He has at least five different modes of procuring fish; and his hooks and nets are better than could be made by any European who did not practise the making of hooks and nets as a trade. His fishing-lines, made of any raw material within his reach, are strong and good and lasting.
He goes out in his canoe in the night and uses torches to attract the fish, exactly after the manner of the poachers of the North Tyne in England, who in their trows, and with lights burning and provided with leisters or spears, robbed that river of its salmon.[1] He uses the bident in the shallow weedy waters of the Murray, and follows the fish by the same signs as those that guided the ancient Egyptian when he pushed his papyrus punt through the broad leaves of the lotus in the lagoons and ponds that were filled by the waters of the Nile.
- ↑ Rambles on the Border, 1835.
