Angas was an uneducated scribbler, but what shall we say on finding his sentimental view accepted by the professional German anthropologists, Gerland (VI., 780) and Jung (109)?  Anyone familiar with Australian life must suspect at once that this custom is simply one of the horrible modes of punishment devised for women.  Curr says the woman is “obliged by custom” to carry her dead child, and he adds:  “I believe that this practice is insisted on when a young mother loses her first born, as the death of the child is thought to have come about by carelessness.”  To suppose that Australian mothers who usually kill all but two of their six or more children could be capable of such an act for sentimental reasons is to show a logical faculty on a par with the Australian’s own.  This point has already been discussed, but a further instance related by Dr. Moorehouse (J.D.  Wood, 390), will bring the matter home: 

“A female just born was thus about to be destroyed for the benefit of a boy about four years old, whom the mother was nourishing, while the father was standing by, ready to commit the deed.  Through the kindness of a lady to whom the circumstances became known, and our joint interference, this one life was saved, and the child was properly attended to by the mother, although she at first urged the necessity of its death as strenuously as the father.”  “In other parts of the country,” Wood adds, “the women do the horrible work themselves.  They are not content with destroying the life of the infants, but they eat them.”

ROMANTIC AFFLICTION

Here, as in several of the alleged cases of African sentimentality, we see the great need of caution and detective sagacity in interpreting facts.  To take another instance:  Westermarck (503), in his search for cases of romantic attachment and absorbing passion among savages, fancies he has come across one in Australia, for he tells us that “even the rude Australian girl sings in a strain of romantic affliction—­

     ‘I never shall see my darling again.’”

As a matter of fact this line has no more to do with the “true monogamous instinct, the absorbing passion for one,” than with Julius Caesar.  Eyre relates (310, 70) that when Miago, the first native who ever quitted Perth, was taken away on the Beagle in 1838, his mother sang during his absence: 

     Whither does that lone ship wander,
     My young son I shall never see again.

Grosse, who often sides with Westermarck, here parts company with him, being convinced that

“what is called love in Australia ... is no spiritual affection, but a sensual passion, which is quickly cooled in the enjoyment....  The only examples of sympathetic lyrics that have been found in Australia are mourning songs, and even they relate only to relatives by blood and tribal affinity” (B.A., 244)[179].

A LOCK OF HAIR