“the natives are very fond of them....  If a white man wants to offend a native let him beat his dog.  I have seen women crying over a dog, when bitten by snakes, as if over their own children.”

The dogs are very useful to them, helping them to find snakes, rats, and other animals for food.  Yet, when mealtime comes, “the dog, notwithstanding its services and their affection for it, fares very badly, receiving nothing but the bones.”  “Hence the dog is always in very low condition.”

Another writer[178] with a better developed sense of humor, says that “It may be doubted whether the man does not value his dog, when alive, quite as much as he does his woman, and think of both quite as often and lovingly after he has eaten them.”

As for the women, they are little better than the men.  What Mitchell says of them (I., 307) is characteristic.  After a fight, he says, the women

“do not always follow their fugitive husbands from the field, but frequently go over, as a matter of course, to the victors, even with young children on their backs; and thus it was, probably, that after we had made the lower tribes sensible of our superiority, that the three girls followed our party, beseeching us to take them with us.”

The following from Grey (II., 230) gives us an idea of wifely affection and fidelity:  “The women have generally some favorite amongst the young men, always looking forward to be his wife at the death of her husband.”  How utterly beyond the Australian horizon was the idea of common decency, not to speak of such a holy thing as affection, is revealed by a cruel custom described by Howitt (344): 

“The Kurnai and the Brajerak were not intermarrying tribes, unless by capture, and in this case each man took the woman whose husband he had been the first to spear.”

It would of course be absurd to suppose the widows in such cases capable of suffering as our women would under such circumstances.  They are quite as callous and cruel as the men.  Evidence is given in the Jackman book (149) that, like Indian women, they torture prisoners of war, breaking toes, fingers, and arms, digging out the eyes and filling the sockets with hot sand, etc.

“Husbands rarely show much affection for their wives,” wrote Eyre (II., 214).

“After a long absence I have seen natives, upon their return, go to their camp, exhibiting the most stoical indifference, never taking the least notice of their wives.”

Elsewhere (321) he says, with reference to the fact that marriage is not regarded as any pledge of chastity, which is not recognized as a virtue:  “But little real affection consequently exists between husbands and wives, and younger men value a wife principally for her services as a slave.”  And in a Latin footnote, in which he describes the licentious customs of promiscuous intercourse and the harsh treatment