Primary tabs
Transcription
6
pressing downwards with the cheek and jawbone. Accidents were rare though I have seen one or two adults partly crippled by falls in their boyhood. Sir Ogilvie of Yulgilbar once saw a blackboy fall from a high tree with fatal results.He had used a vine all day till it became frayed and worn so that it broke.
The arts and crafts of these northern river natives were few and simple though a good deal of ingenuity was displayed in some.
They constructed three kinds of weather shelters the principal being of stringy bark sheets stripped from adjacent trees and propped up, lean-to fashion, with forks and sticks. The outer bark of tea trees was also used laid in layers over a framework of sticks. Thirdly, cunning and cosy little shelters were contrived with bushes and leaves but these were only used in cool dry weather, against cold westerlies and the like, for they would not turn heavy rain. No doubt the blacks were to some extent weather-wise for their shelters were always erected with their backs to the wind and rain the fronts being open to the invariable fire.
If these primitive people had, to a superlative degree, any special quality or virtue I should put it down as patience.
The cultivation of this quality probably arose from the fact that for centuries past they had lived in the Stone Age. With such insufficient implements as stone tomahawks, flint