This tale is open to the same criticism as Lumholtz’s.  The man risks his life, not for another, but to secure what he covets.  It is a romantic love-story, but there is no indication anywhere of romantic love, while some of the details are fictitiously embellished.  An Australian girl does not put her head on her lover’s bosom, nor could she camp alone and keep up two columns of smoke for several days without being discovered and kidnapped.  The story is evidently one of an ordinary elopement, embellished by European fancy.[180]

LOCAL COLOR IN COURTSHIP

There is some quaint local color in Australian courtship, but usually blows play too important a role to make their procedure acceptable to anyone with a less waddy-proof skull than an Australian.  Spencer and Gillen relate (556) that in cases of charming, the initiative is sometimes taken by the woman,

“who can, of course, imagine that she has been charmed, and then find a willing aider and abettor in the man whose vanity is flattered by this response to his magic power, which he can soon persuade himself that he did really exercise; besides which, an extra wife has its advantages in the way of procuring food and saving him trouble, while, if his other women object, the matter is one which does not hurt him, for it can easily be settled once and for all by a stand-up fight between the women and the rout of the loser.”

Quaintly Australian are the following details of Kurnai courtship given by Howitt: 

“Sometimes it might happen that the young men were backward.  Perhaps there might be several young girls who ought to be married, and the women had then to take the matter in hand when some eligible young men were at camp.  They consulted, and some went out in the forest and with sticks killed some of the little birds, the yeerung.  These they brought back to the camp and casually showed them to some of the men; then there was an uproar.  The men were very angry.  The yeerungs, their brothers, had been killed!  The young men got sticks; the girls took sticks also, and they attacked each other.  Heavy blows were struck, heads were broken, and blood flowed, but no one stopped them.

“Perhaps this light might last a quarter of an hour, then they separated.  Some even might be left on the ground insensible.  Even the men and women who were married joined in the free fight.  The next day the young men, the brewit, went, and in their turn killed some of the women’s ‘sisters,’ the birds djeetgun, and the consequence was that on the following day there was a worse fight than before.  It was perhaps a week or two before the wounds and bruises were healed.  By and by, some day one of the eligible young men met one of the marriageable young women; he looked at her, and said ‘Djeetgun!’ She said ’Yeerung!  What does the yeerung eat?’ The reply was, ‘He eats so-and-so,’ mentioning kangaroo, opossum, or emu, or some other game.  Then they laughed, and she ran off with him without telling anyone.”

LOVE-LETTERS