from another tribe and carried off, and that at present woman-stealing is not encouraged, as it is apt to involve a whole tribe in war for one man’s sake.  From older writers, however, one gets the impression that wife-stealing was a common custom.  Howitt (351) remarks concerning the “wild white man” William Buckley, who lived many years among the natives, and whose adventures were written up by John Morgan, that at first sight his statements “seem to record merely a series of duels and battles about women who were stolen, speared, and slaughtered;” and Brough Smyth (77) quotes John Bulmer, who says that among the Gippsland natives

“sometimes a man who has no sister [to swap] will, in desperation, steal a wife; but this is invariably a cause of bloodshed.  Should a woman object to go with her husband, violence would be used.  I have seen a man drag away a woman by the hair of her head.  Often a club is used until the poor creature is frightened into submission.”

In South Australia there is a special expression for bride-stealing—­Milla mangkondi, or force-marriage. (Bonwick, 65.)

Mitchell (I., 307) also observed that the possession of the women “seems to be associated with all their ideas of fighting.”  The same impression is conveyed by the writings of Salvado, Wilkes, and others—­Sturt, e.g., who wrote (II., 283) that the abduction of a married or unmarried woman was a frequent cause of quarrel.  Mitchell (I., 330) relates that when some whites told a native that they had killed a native of another tribe, his first thought and only remark was, “Stupid white fellows!  Why did you not bring away the gins (women)?” It is unfortunate for a woman to possess the kind of “beauty” Australians admire for, as Grey says (II., 231),

“The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of captivity to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders several hundred miles from the home of her infancy.”

It is not only from other and hostile tribes that these men forcibly appropriate girls or married women.  Among the Hunter River tribes (Curr, III., 353), “men renowned as warriors frequently attacked their inferiors in strength and took their wives from them.”  The Queensland natives, we are told by Narcisse Peltier, who lived among them seventeen years, “not unfrequently fight with spears for the possession of a woman” (Spencer, P.S., I., 601).  Lumholtz says (184) that “the majority of the young men wait a long time before they get wives, partly for the reason that they have not the courage to fight the requisite duel for one with an older man.”  On another page (212) he relates: