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 sexual 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 gratitude 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 sexes 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 apron 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):