_Huts._--Their locomotion was predetermined, and their encampments regularly chosen; generally on the banks of a river or a lagoon. Each family had its fire; hunted separately, and erected a hut for its own accommodation. On the mountains, and beside the sea shore, they lodged in caverns; or where these were not found, as in the open country, they reared huts, or rather screens: these were of bark, half-circular, gathered at the top, and supported by stakes: in the front they kindled a fire. These huts formed rude villages, and were seen from seventeen to forty together. The former number being raised by a tribe of seventy, from four to five must have lodged under one shelter. Some, found at the westward, were permanent: they were like bee-hives, and thatched: several such were seen by Jorgenson, on the western shore--strong, and apparently erected for long use. They drew water for the sick in shells: the robust threw themselves on the bank, and drank as they lay. Boiled water was not used in their primitive state; it is said to have been unknown. This is scarcely credible: a heated shell or stone, filled by rain water, might have discovered the secret. They preserved their fire, usually by carrying a brand; if this was extinguished, they replaced it by going back to their last encampment, where the fuel still smouldered. It is said, that they were not ignorant of producing fire by friction.
_Food._--Their appetite was voracious: a woman was watched one day, during which, beside a double ration of bread, she devoured more than fifty eggs, as large as those of a duck. Mr. O'Connor saw a child, eight years old, eat a kangaroo rat, and attack a cray-fish. The game they cast into the fire, and when singed drew it out and extracted the entrails; it was then returned to the embers, and when thoroughly warmed, the process was completed. They were acquainted with the common expedient of savage nations, who pass from repletion to hunger: they tightened a girdle of kangaroo skin, which they wore when otherwise naked. Fat they detested; some tribes also rejected the male, and others the female wallaby, as food: the cause is unknown. A few vegetable productions, as the native potato, and a fungus, which forces up the ground, called native bread, and which tastes like cold boiled rice; the fern and grass-tree, also yielded them food. White caterpillars and ant eggs, and several other productions, supplemented their ordinary diet. The animals on which they subsisted chiefly, were the emu, kangaroo, wallaby, and the opossum: the latter living in trees. They obtained a liquor from the cyder tree (_eucalyptus_), which grows on the Shannon, and elsewhere: it is tapped like the maple; its juice, of the taste of molasses, trickled down into a hole at the foot of the tree, and was covered with a stone. By a natural fermentation, it became slightly intoxicating; and in early days was liked by the stockmen.