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(Previous page "fasted" not rasted)
No tribe has been known to practise cannibalism, except
in their limited and religious manner, and in cases of rare emergency.
It is commonly reported that when the bunya bunya ripens in Queensland, then blacks who came from a distance to the
bunya bunya country, are forbidden by a law of the
tribe to whom that country belongs to kill so much as an
opossum there; and after living for some weeks on their national
fruit, a pine cone resembling chestnuts in taste, they have
an irresistible craving for animal food, and rather than
provoke war by killing any of the heasts of that district, it is
said they sacrifice a youth of their own company, and devour
his or her flesh. Horrible as this is, it is no more
than Europeans have been known to do when pressed by
hunger; and notwithstanding the occasional exceptions,
it may truly be said that the Australian aborigines are
not Cannibals. They do not, like most of the heathen
in the Pacific islands, feast on their conquered foes.
Those who eat a portion of their deceased relatives preserve the remainder, in some places smoking the corpse, which
is then placed in a sheet of bark and raised on a
scaffolding. When the flesh is gone, the bones are preserved in baskets suspended on branches of trees. But in the Interior,