The natives as a rule did not venture far from the sea-coast, even when provided with the better kinds of canoes.
At Twofold Bay and Jervis Bay, in New South Wales, they were, however, adventurous, and caught and brought to land very large fish. The men of that part of the coast seem to have taken readily to seafearing. Mr. Boyd, a settler at Twofold Bay, employed the natives many years ago as part of the crew of his yacht; and at one time they were constantly engaged in the boats of the whaling station, where their excellent sight rendered them extremely useful in seeing and harpooning the fish.[1]
The natives used the bark of trees for canoes because of the labor and difficulty of carving good canoes out of solid wood. If they had been mariners, they would have used the splendid trees that grow in many places very close to the water's edge in fashioning durable vessels. There are perhaps no trees in the world better suited for canoes than some of those growing in the Australian forests, but the woods generally are hard and difficult to work, and it is absolutely necessary, in order to get good sound wood, that they be felled at the right season. It is the belief of many that the Australian woods will not float in water, and that is the reason that the natives use bark. But iron ships float, and a canoe made of ironbark wood not only floats, but is buoyant. Even the large thick heavy wooden tarnuk, made of the gnarl of a gum-tree, is buoyant. The story generally believed, that Australian woods are unfit for canoes because they are not buoyant is like that told of the Fellows of the Royal Society of England. One at least did not believe that a vessel of water was not made heavier when a fish was put into it. He made an experiment, and convinced his colleagues that his heterodoxy was orthodoxy. And so, when the native woods are tested, they are found to be admirably adapted to single-trunk canoe building.
The means of transport by water on the north-east coast, and at Cape York, have been improved by the natives so far as to permit of their being properly called navigators. Some of their canoes formed of the trunk of the cotton-tree (Cochlospermum) are hollowed out. They are more than fifty feet in length, and each is capable of conveying twelve or fifteen natives. They are provided with outrigger poles, and are propelled by short paddles or sails of palm-leaf matting.
The canoes of the north-eastern natives differ altogether from the rafts or canoes seen by Dampier on the north-west coast, and the bark canoes found in the lakes of the interior by Oxley some sixty years ago, and by Mitchell nearly forty years ago. The bark canoe, it may safely be assumed, is Australian—as much as the boomerang or the weet-weet; but the hollowed log canoes of the north-east are imitations of the proas of the Malays and the Papuaus.
A very interesting controversy arose about fourteen years ago respecting the canoes in use in Australia; and the letters of the late Mr. Beete Jukes, Mr. Brierly, and Sir D. Cooper, addressed to the editor of the Athenæum, contain so much that is interesting, both in consequence of the errors made originally and the rectification of the errors, that I have quoted
- ↑ Stokes, vol. II., p. 417.
