Among the different tribes of Australians, the boomerang is the principal weapon. This is a flat stick, three feet in length, and curves at the centre. It is thrown into the air among birds, jerks in a zigzag, spiral or circular fashion, and when thrown by a person skilled in its use is sure to bring down a few individuals at every throwing. Besides this weapon they have the throwing-stick, flint-pointed spears, shields, stone-hatchets, digging-sticks, netting-needles, nets of sinews, fibres or hairs, water-skins and canoes.
No government exists among this people outside that of the family, and no laws except certain traditionary rules about property. As for their religion, they have little save their terror of ghosts and demons, and certain superstitious traditional rites applicable to epochs in a man’s life, but more especially so at the time of his burial. At ten years of age, a boy is covered with blood; at ten to fourteen, he is circumcised in the north and south of Australia, but not in the west or on the Murray River; and at twenty, he is tattooed or scarred. Felicity after death is the reward of proper burial, but a man dying in battle or rotting in a field becomes an evil genius.
No more perfect example of tribal organization exists than that of the tribes of Australasia. In a very large proportion of existing tribes, the tribe is an aggregate of several stocks or distinct bodies of kindred, the persons composing the tribes being included in stocks which are, or are accounted, distinct from each other. Two tribal customs, namely, the prohibition of marriage between persons of the same stock, and the reckoning of kinship through females only, so that children are accounted of the stock of their mother, sustain this organization. Persons of the same stock, too, owe duties to each other, and are to some extent participants in each other’s liabilities. An injury done by a man is an injury done by his stock, which may be avenged upon any member thereof; or an injury done to a man is an injury done by his stock, for which every member of it is bound to seek vengeance. As a consequence of these customs, a husband must be of a different stock from his wife or wives, and therefore must be accounted of a different stock from his children; and if he has wives of different stocks, then their respective children are accounted of different stocks. More than one stock, it will thus be perceived, is represented in every household. And since a man owes duties to his stock--the duties of acknowledged blood-relationship--while to those of his family who are not of his stock, there being nothing but the accident of birth to unite him, it necessarily follows that the family among these tribes has very little cohesion.