Mr. Samuel Bennett, in his exceedingly valuable and interesting History of Australian Discovery and Colonization, makes the following remarks respecting the canoes of the Aborigines:—"The canoes used by the Aborigines on the eastern coast are the best to be found in the whole continent, and they scarcely deserve the name. The Australian canoe represents one of the most primitive appliances ever used by mankind for the purpose of navigation. In some districts it consists of a mere sheet of bark, slightly raised at the edges, serving even in still water to float but a single person, and requiring the greatest care to prevent its overturning. In others a nearer approach is made to the boat form by bending the sheet of bark somewhat in the form of the sides of a boat, sewing or tying up its ends with some fibrous material, and making it water-tight by means of gum or clay. At best, however, it was but
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| Canoes, Lake Tyers, from a Photograph by Walters. |
| FIG. 243. |
a sorry substitute for a boat, and it is probable, from the fact that it was not even known to some of the coast tribes, and that it had in its most rudimentary state never reached Tasmania, that its introduction was not of very ancient date even on the mainland. To the tribes of unmixed Aboriginal blood, like the Tasmanians were, and some on the north-west coast still are, the canoe was wholly unknown. It was, therefore, in all probability a thing of foreign invention, and of modern introduction. The comparative ignorance of the Australian Aborigines, the Andaman Islanders, and other people of Negrito or Indian Negro race, of the use of the canoe, supplies a strong link to connect them with each other. . . . ."[1]
I cannot agree with Mr. Bennett. There is no evidence which would suggest that the bark canoe is of foreign invention. Indeed it is almost beyond doubt that the Australians of Victoria, before the arrival of the whites, had learnt
- ↑ The History of Australian Discovery and Colonization, by Samuel Bennett, p. 266.
