“In the region of Sydney, too, the natives used to be entirely nude, and as late as 1816 men would go about the streets of Paramatta and Sydney naked, despite many prohibitions and attempts to clothe them, which always failed”

—­so ingrained was the absence of shame in the native mind.

Jackman, the “Australian Captive,” an Englishman who spent seventeen months among the natives, describes them as being “as nude as Adam and Eve” (99).  “The Australians’ utter lack of modesty is remarkable,” writes F. Mueller (207): 

“it reveals itself in the way in which their clothes are worn.  While an attempt is made to cover the upper, especially the back part of the body, the private parts are often left uncovered.”

One early explorer, Sturt (II., 126), found the natives of the interior, without exception, “in a complete state of nudity.”

The still earlier Governor Philipps (1787) found that the inhabitants of New South Wales had no idea that one part of the body ought to be covered more than any other.  Captain Flinders, who saw much of Australia in 1795, speaks in one place (I., 66) of “the short skin cloak which is of kangaroo, and worn over the shoulders, leaving the rest of the body naked.”  This was in New South Wales.  At Keppel Bay (II., 30) he writes:  “These people ... go entirely naked;” and so on at other points of the continent touched on his voyage.  In Dawson (61) we read:  “They were perfectly naked, as they always are.”  Nor has the Australian in his native state changed in the century or more since whites have known him.  In the latest book on Central Australia (1899) by Spencer and Gillen we read (17) that to this day a native woman “with nothing on except an ancient straw hat and an old pair of boots is perfectly happy.”

IS CIVILIZATION DEMORALIZING?

The reader is now in a position to judge of the reliability of the “fearless” Stephens as a witness, and of the blind bias of the anthropologist who uses him as such.  It surely ought not to be necessary to prove that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide, wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant as unreproved national customs, could not possibly be refined and moral in their sexual relations, which offer the greatest of all temptations to unrestrained selfishness.  Yet Stephens tells us in his article that before the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and “conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;” while Westermarck (61, 64, 65) classes the Australians with those savages “among whom sexual intercourse out of wedlock is of rare occurrence.”  On page 70 he declares that “in a savage condition of life ... there is comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations;” and on page 539, in summing up his doctrines, he asserts that “we have some reason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have, on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress of civilization.”  The refutation of this libel on civilization—­which is widely believed—­is one of the main objects of the following pages—­is, in fact, one of the main objects of this whole volume.