George Grey (II., 312-14) gives an amusing sketch of an aboriginal scene of conjugal bliss.  Weerang, an old man, has four wives, the last of whom, just added to the harem, gets all his attention.  This excites the anger of one of the older ones, who reproaches the husband with having stolen her, an unwilling bride, from another and better man.  “May the sorcerer,” she adds, “bite and tear her whom you have now taken to your bed.  Here am I, rebuking young men who dare to look at me, while she, your favorite, replete with arts and wiles, dishonors you.”  This last insinuation is too much for the young favorite, who retorts by calling her a liar and declaring that she has often seen her exchanging nods and winks with her paramour.  The rival’s answer is a blow with her stick.  A general engagement follows, which the old man finally ends by beating several of the wives severely about the head with a hammer.[171]

PUGNACIOUS FEMALES

Jealousy is capable of converting even civilized women into fiends; all the more these bush women, who have few opportunities for cultivating the gentler feminine qualities.  Indeed, so masculine are these women that were it not for woman’s natural inferiority in strength their tyrants might find it hard to subdue them.  Bulmer says[172] that

“as a rule both husband and wife had fearful tempers; there was no bearing and forbearing.  When they quarrelled it was a matter of the strongest conquering, for neither would give in.”

Describing a native fight over some trifling cause Taplin says (71): 

“Women were dancing about naked, casting dust in the air, hurling obscene language at their enemies, and encouraging their friends.  It was a perfect tempest of rage.”

Roth says of the Queensland natives that the women fight like men, with thick, heavy fighting poles, four feet long.

“One of the combatants, with her hands between her knees, supposing that only one stick is available, ducks her head slightly—­almost in the position of a school-boy playing leap-frog, and waits for her adversary’s blow, which she receives on the top of her head.  The attitudes are now reversed, and the one just attacked is now the attacking party.  Blow for blow is thus alternated until one of them gives in, which is generally the case after three or four hits.  Great animal pluck is sometimes displayed....  Should a woman ever put up her hand or a stick, etc., to ward a blow, she would be regarded in the light of a coward” (141).

“At Genorminston, the women coming up to join a fray give a sort of war-whoop; they will jump up in the air, and as their feet, a little apart, touch the ground, they knock up the dust and sand with the fighting-pole, etc., held between their legs, very like one’s early reminiscences in the picture-books of a witch riding a broom-stick.”

“The ferocity of the women when excited exceeds that of the men,” Grey informs us (II., 314); “they deal dreadful blows at one another,” etc.