Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 44

The lives of the women "are rated as of the less value than those of the men." "Their corpses are often thrown to dogs for food" (Waitz, VL, 775). "These poor creatures," says Wilkinson of the South Australian women (322),

"are in an abject state, and are only treated with about the same consideration as the dogs that accompany them; they are obliged to give any food that may be desired to the men, and sit and see them eat it, considering themselves amply repaid if they are rewarded by having a piece of gizzle, or any other leavings, pitched to them."

J.S. Wood (71) relates this characteristic story:

"A native servant was late in keeping his appointment with his master, and, on inquiry, it was elicited that he had just quarrelled with one of his wives, and had speared her through the body. On being rebuked by his master, he turned off the matter with a laugh, merely remarking that white men had only one wife, whereas he had two, and did not mind losing one till he could buy another."

Sturt. who made two exploring expeditions (1829-1831), wrote (II., 55) that the men oblige their women to procure their own food, or they "throw to them over their shoulders the bones they have already picked, with a nonchalance that is extremely amusing." The women are also excluded from religious ceremonies; many of the best things to eat are taboo to them; and the cruel contempt of the men pursues them even after death. The men are buried with ceremony (Curr, I., 89), but "as the women and children are held to be very inferior to the men whilst alive, and their spirits are but little feared after death, they are interred with but scant ceremony... the women alone wailing."

Thus they show their contempt even for the ghosts of women, though they are so afraid of other ghosts that they never leave camp in the dark or have a nocturnal dance except by moonlight or with big fires!

WERE SAVAGES CORRUPTED BY WHITES?

Such is the Australian's treatment of woman--a treatment so selfish, so inconsistent with the altruistic traits and impulses of romantic love--sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrificing affection, not to speak of adoration--that it alone proves him incapable of so refined a sentiment. If any doubt remained, it would be removed by his utter inability to rise above the sensual sphere. The Australian is absolutely immoral and incredibly licentious. Here, however, we are confronted by a spectre with which the sentimentalists try to frighten the searchers for truth, and which must therefore be exorcised first.

They grant the wantonness of savages, but declare that it is "due chiefly to the influence of civilization." This is one of the favorite subterfuges of Westermarck, who resorts to it again and again. In reference to the Australians he cites what Edward Stephens wrote regarding the former inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains:

"Those who speak of the natives as a naturally degraded race, either do not speak from experience, or they judge them by what they have become when the abuse of intoxicants and contact with the most wicked of the white race have begun their deadly work. As a rule to which there are no exceptions, if a tribe of blacks is found away from the white settlement, the more vicious of the white men are most anxious to make the acquaintance of the natives, and that, too, solely for purposes of immorality. ... I saw the natives and was much with them before those dreadful immoralities were well known ... and I say it fearlessly, that nearly all their evils they owed to the white man's immorality and to the white man's drink."

Now the first question a conscientious truth-seeker feels inclined to ask regarding this "fearless" Stephens who thus boldly accuses of ignorance all those who hold that the Australian race was degraded before it came in contact with whites, is, "Who is he and what are his qualifications for serving as a witness in this matter?" He is, or was, a simple-minded settler, kindly no doubt, who for some inscrutable reason was allowed to contribute a paper to the _Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales_ (Vol. x.x.xIII.). His qualifications for appearing as an expert in Australian anthropology may be inferred from various remarks in his paper. He navely tells a story about a native who killed an opossum, and after eating the meat, threw the intestines to his wife. "Ten years before that," he adds, "that same man would have treated his wife as himself." Yet we have just seen that all the explorers, in all parts of the country, found that the natives who had never seen a white man treated their women like slaves and dogs.

ABORIGINAL HORRORS

If the savage learned his wantonness from the whites, did he get all his other vicious habits from the same source? We know on the best authorities that the disgusting practice of cannibalism prevailed extensively among the natives. "They eat the young men when they die, and the young women if they are fat" (Curr, III., 147). Lumholtz ent.i.tled his book on Australia _Among Cannibals_. The Rev. G. Taplin says (XV.):

"Among the Dieyerie tribe cannibalism is the universal practice, and all who die are indiscriminately devoured ... the mother eats the flesh of her children, and the children that of their mother," etc.

"If a man had a fat wife," says the same writer (2), "he was always particularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might be seized by prowling cannibals." Among the wilder tribes few women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."[154] Would the "fearless" Stephens say that the natives learned these practices from the whites? Would he say they learned from the whites the "universal custom ... to slay every unprotected male stranger met with" (Curr, I., 133)?

"Infanticide is very common, and appears to be practised solely to get rid of the trouble of rearing children," wrote Eyre (II., 324). Curr (I., 70) heard that "some tribes within the area of the Central Division cut off the nipples of the females' b.r.e.a.s.t.s, in some instances, for the purpose of rendering their rearing of children impossible." On the Mitch.e.l.l River, "children were killed for the most trivial offences, such as for accidentally breaking a weapon as they trotted about the camp" (Curr, II., 403). Twins are destroyed in South Australia, says Leigh (159), and if the mother dies "they throw the living infant into the grave, while infanticide is an every-day occurrence." Curr (I., 70) believes that the average number of children borne by each woman was six, the maximum ten; but of all these only two boys and one girl as a rule were kept, "the rest were destroyed immediately after birth," as we destroy litters of puppies.

Sometimes the infants were smothered over a fire (Waitz, VI., 779), and deformed children were always killed. Taplin (13) writes that before his colony was established among them infanticide was very prevalent among the natives. "One intelligent woman said she thought that if the Europeans had waited a few more years they would have found the country without inhabitants." Strangulation, a blow of the waddy, or filling the ears with red-hot embers, were the favorite ways of killing their own babies.

Did the whites teach the angelic savages all these diabolical customs?

If so, they must have taught them customs invented for the occasion, since they are not practised by whites in any part of the world. But perhaps Stephens would have been willing to waive this point.

Sentimentalists are usually more or less willing to concede that savages are devils in most things if we will only admit in return that they are angels in their s.e.xual relations. For instance, if we may believe Stephens, no nun was ever more modest than the native Australian woman. Once, he says, he was asked to visit a poor old black woman in the last stages of consumption:

"Her case was hopeless, and when she was in almost the last agony of mortal dissolution I was astounded at her efforts at concealment, indicative of extreme modesty.

As I drew her opossum rug over her poor emaciated body the look of grat.i.tude which came from her dying eyes told me in language more eloquent than words that beneath that dark and dying exterior there was a soul which in a few hours angels would delight to honor."

The poor woman was probably cold and glad to be covered; if she had any modesty regarding exposure of the body she could have learned it from no one but the dreadful, degraded whites, for the Australian himself is an utter stranger to such a feeling. On this point the explorers and students of the natives are unanimous. Both men and women went absolutely naked except in those regions where the climate was cold.

NAKED AND NOT ASHAMED

"They are as innocent of shame as the animals of the forest," says E.

Palmer; and J. Bonwick writes: "Nakedness is no shame with them. As a French writer once remarked to a lady, 'With a pair of gloves you could clothe six men.'" Even ornaments are worn by the men only: "females are content with their natural charms." W.E. Roth, in his standard work on the Queensland natives, says that "with both s.e.xes the privates are only covered on special public occasions, or when in close proximity to white settlements." With the Warburton River tribe (Curr, II, 18) "the women go quite naked, and the men have only a belt made of human hair round the waist from which a fringe spun of hair of rats hangs in front." Sturt wrote (I., 106): "The men are much better looking than the women; both go perfectly naked."

At the dances a covering of feathers or leaves is sometimes worn by the women, but is removed as soon as the dance is over. Narrinyeri girls, says Taplin (15), "wear a sort of ap.r.o.n of fringe, called Kaininggi, until they bear their first child. If they have no children it is taken from them and burned by their husbands while they are asleep." Meyer (189) says the same of the Encounter Bay tribe, and similar customs prevailed at Port Jackson and many other places.

Summing up the observations of Cook, Turnbull, Cunningham, Tench, Hunter, and others, Waitz remarks (VI., 737):

"In the region of Sydney, too, the natives used to be entirely nude, and as late as 1816 men would go about the streets of Paramatta and Sydney naked, despite many prohibitions and attempts to clothe them, which always failed"

--so ingrained was the absence of shame in the native mind.

Jackman, the "Australian Captive," an Englishman who spent seventeen months among the natives, describes them as being "as nude as Adam and Eve" (99). "The Australians' utter lack of modesty is remarkable,"

writes F. Muller (207):

"it reveals itself in the way in which their clothes are worn. While an attempt is made to cover the upper, especially the back part of the body, the private parts are often left uncovered."

One early explorer, Sturt (II., 126), found the natives of the interior, without exception, "in a complete state of nudity."

The still earlier Governor Philipps (1787) found that the inhabitants of New South Wales had no idea that one part of the body ought to be covered more than any other. Captain Flinders, who saw much of Australia in 1795, speaks in one place (I., 66) of "the short skin cloak which is of kangaroo, and worn over the shoulders, leaving the rest of the body naked." This was in New South Wales. At Keppel Bay (II., 30) he writes: "These people ... go entirely naked;" and so on at other points of the continent touched on his voyage. In Dawson (61) we read: "They were perfectly naked, as they always are." Nor has the Australian in his native state changed in the century or more since whites have known him. In the latest book on Central Australia (1899) by Spencer and Gillen we read (17) that to this day a native woman "with nothing on except an ancient straw hat and an old pair of boots is perfectly happy."

IS CIVILIZATION DEMORALIZING?

The reader is now in a position to judge of the reliability of the "fearless" Stephens as a witness, and of the blind bias of the anthropologist who uses him as such. It surely ought not to be necessary to prove that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide, wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant as unreproved national customs, could not possibly be refined and moral in their s.e.xual relations, which offer the greatest of all temptations to unrestrained selfishness. Yet Stephens tells us in his article that before the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and "conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;" while Westermarck (61, 64, 65) cla.s.ses the Australians with those savages "among whom s.e.xual intercourse out of wedlock is of rare occurrence."

On page 70 he declares that "in a savage condition of life ... there is comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations;" and on page 539, in summing up his doctrines, he a.s.serts that "we have some reason to believe that irregular connections between the s.e.xes have, on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress of civilization." The refutation of this libel on civilization--which is widely believed--is one of the main objects of the following pages--is, in fact, one of the main objects of this whole volume.

There are a few cities in Southern Europe where the rate of illegitimacy equals, and in one or two cases slightly exceeds, the legitimate births; but that is owing to the fact that betrayed girls from the country nearly always go to the cities to find a refuge and hide their shame. Taking the countries as a whole we find that even Scotland, which has always had a somewhat unsavory reputation in this respect, had, in 1897, only 6.98 per cent of illegitimate births--say seven in a hundred; the highest rate since 1855 having been 10.2.

There are, of course, besides this, cases of uncertain paternity, but their number is comparatively small, and it certainly is much larger in the _less_ civilized countries of Europe than in the more civilized. Taking the five or six most advanced countries of Europe and America, it is safe to say that the paternity is certain in ninety cases out of a hundred. If we now look at the Australians as described by eye-witnesses since the earliest exploring tours, we find a state of affairs which makes paternity uncertain _in all cases without exception_, and also a complete indifference on the subject.

ABORIGINAL WANTONNESS

One of the first explorers of the desert interior was Eyre (1839). His experiences--covering ten years--led him to speak (378) of "the illicit and almost unlimited intercourse between the s.e.xes." "Marriage is not looked upon as any pledge of chast.i.ty; indeed, no such virtue is recognized" (319). "Many of the native dances are of a grossly licentious character." Men rarely get married before they are twenty-five, but that does not mean that they are continent. From their thirteenth year they have promiscuous intercourse with girls who abandon themselves at the age of ten, though they rarely become mothers before they are sixteen.[155]

Another early explorer of the interior (1839), T.L. Mitch.e.l.l, gives this glimpse of aboriginal morality (I., 133):

"The natives ... in return for our former disinterested kindness, persisted in their endeavors to introduce us very particularly to their women. They ordered them to come up, divested of their cloaks and bags, and placed them before us. Most of the men appeared to possess two, the pair in general consisting of a fat plump gin and one much younger. Each man placed himself before his gins, and bowing forward with a shrug, the hands and arms being thrown back pointing to each gin, as if to say, Take which you please. The females, on their part, evinced no apprehension, but seemed to regard us as beings of a race so different, without the slightest indication of either fear, aversion, or surprise. Their looks were rather expressive of a ready acquiescence in the proffered kindness of the men, and when at length they brought a sable nymph _vis-a-vis_ to Mr. White, I could preserve my gravity no longer, and throwing the spears aside, I ordered the bullock-drivers to proceed."

George Grey, who, during his two exploring expeditions into Northwestern and Western Australia, likewise came in contact with the "uncontaminated" natives, found that, though "a spear through the calf of the leg is the least punishment that awaits" a faithless wife if detected, and sometimes the death-penalty is inflicted, yet "the younger women were much addicted to intrigue" (I., 231, 253), as indeed they appear to be throughout the continent, as we shall see presently.

Of all Australian inst.i.tutions none is more characteristic than the corrobborees or nocturnal dances which are held at intervals by the various tribes all over the continent, and were of course held centuries before a white man was ever seen on the continent; and no white man in his wildest nightmare ever dreamt of such scenes as are enacted at them. They are given preferably by moonlight, are apt to last all night, and are often attended by the most obscene and licentious practices. The corrobboree, says Curr (I., 92), was undoubtedly "often an occasion of licentiousness and atrocity"; fights, even wars, ensue, "and almost invariably as the result of outrages on women." The songs heard at these revels are sometimes harmless and the dances not indecent, says the Rev. G. Taplin (37),

"but at other times the songs will consist of the vilest obscenity. I have seen dances which were the most disgusting displays of obscene gesture possible to be imagined, and although I stood in the dark alone, and n.o.body knew I was there, I felt ashamed to look upon such abominations.... The dances of the women are very immodest and lewd."

John Mathew (in Curr, III., 168) testifies regarding the corrobborees of the Mary Eiver tribes that

"the representations were rarely free from obscenity, and on some occasions indecent gestures were the main parts of the action. I have seen a structure formed of huge forked sticks placed upright in the ground, the forks upward, with saplings reaching from fork to fork, and boughs laid over all. This building was part of the machinery for a corrobboree, at a certain stage of which the males, who were located on the roof, rushed down among the females, who were underneath and handled them licentiously."[156]

LOWER THAN BRUTES

The lowest depth of aboriginal degradation remains to be sounded. Like most of the Africans, Australians are lower than animals inasmuch as they often do not wait till girls have reached the age of p.u.b.erty.

Meyer (190) says of the Narrinyeri: "They are given in marriage at a very early age (ten or twelve years)." Lindsay Cranford[157] testifies regarding five South Australian tribes that "at p.u.b.erty no girl, without exception, is a virgin." With the Paroo River tribes "the girls became wives whilst mere children, and mothers at fourteen"

(Curr, II., 182). Of other tribes Curr's correspondents write (107):

"Girls become wives at from eight to fourteen years." "One often sees a child of eight the wife of a man of fifty."

"Girls are promised to men in infancy, become wives at about ten years of age, and mothers at fourteen or fifteen" (342).