They respected each other's rights. The person who first struck a kangaroo—whether boy or man, and whether the animal was killed or not by the stroke—was held to have captured him, and, when taken, the animal was his property. And then he had to divide the kangaroo into portions if any of those with whom he had covenanted, as regards kangaroo flesh, were present; and the division was always fairly made.
The account given by Thozet of the plants eaten by the natives of North-Eastern Australia is full of interest for the naturalist; and Mr. Gason's lists of the animals and plants which afford food to the natives of Cooper's Creek, though not likely to raise this people in the estimation of Europeans, containing as they do the names of many creatures which are abhorred in civilized communities, are still curious, and certainly worthy of attention.
Victoria, like other parts of Australia, presents diverse physical features; in one area the larger animals are numerous, in others rare. In some parts the natives had to depend for their means of subsistence mainly on fish; in other parts mainly on the kangaroo; in well-timbered tracts opossums were numerous, and on the plains they caught the emu, the turkey, and the native companion. In and on the margins of the forests they took the bear, and in the volcanic tracts wombats multiplied. Many of these animals, the larger weighing as much as 150 lbs., were not very difficult to capture; and the black, with his family, lived in comfort as long as the flesh of these was procurable.
It is not at all probable that the natives penetrated the tracts covered with scrubs or thick timber. The dense forests of South-Western Gippsland and Cape Otway were not often entered, if at all; and the blacks who fished on the shores at the mouth of the Parker had probably no communication with their near neighbours, the natives of the Gellibrand; and it is almost certain that the Cape Otway blacks never travelled through the forest to Colac. The road is now open and easily trodden; but before the advent of the whites, before the scrub was cut and the huge trees hewn, before it was known what was beyond the coast, it was a tract having an aspect that would naturally deter the native from encroaching on it, even if his duty, directed by superstitition, required that he should traverse it.
There is nothing in the records relating to Victoria respecting the use of any earth for the purpose of appeasing hunger; but Grey mentions that one kind of earth, pounded and mixed with the root of the Mene (a species of Hæmadorum) is eaten by the natives of West Australia.
The only plants that are known to be used as narcotics are pitcherie, small dry twigs, which the natives chew; and the leaves of a species of Eugenia, which the people of the north-east smoke when they cannot get tobacco.
Excepting the abstinence from food, which perhaps was common during the period of initiating youths to the privileges of manhood, it is almost certain that voluntary fasting was unknown to the natives of Australia. The priests and sorcerers appear to have been able to exercise their arts without having recourse to any such painful ordeals. On the contrary, they reserved for themselves the best of the food, the wild-fowl, and the sweetest and most tender parts of the larger animals; and, on account of the influence they possessed, they were
