Apart from magic and birds Australian lovers appear not to have been without means of communicating with one another.  Howitt says that if a Kurnai girl took a fancy to a man she might send him a secret message asking, “Will you find me some food?” And this was understood to be a proposal—­a rather unsentimental and utilitarian proposal, it must be confessed.  According to one of the correspondents of Curr (III., 176) the natives along the Mary River even made use of a kind of love-letters which, he says, “were peculiar.”

“When the writer was once travelling with a black boy the latter produced from the lining of his hat a bit of twig about an inch long and having three notches cut on it.  The black boy explained that he was a dhomka (messenger), that the central notch represented himself, and the other notches, one the youth sending the message, the other the girl for whom it was intended.  It meant, in the words of Dickens, ’Barkis is willin’.’  The dhomka sewed up the love-symbol in the lining of his hat, carried it for months without divulging his secret to his sable friends, and finally delivered it safely.  This practice appeared to be well-known, and was probably common.”

Such a “love-letter,” consisting of three notches cut in a twig, symbolically sums up this whole chapter.  The difference between this bushman’s twig and the love-letter of a civilized modern suitor is no greater than the difference between aboriginal Australian “love” and genuine romantic love.

ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC

Between the northern extremity of Australia and the southern extremity of New Guinea, about ninety miles wide, lies Torres Strait, discovered by a Spaniard in 1606, and not visited again by whites till Captain Cook sailed through in 1770.  This strait has been called a “labyrinth of islands, rocks, and coral reefs,” so complicated and dangerous that Torres, the original discoverer, required two months to get through.

WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE

The larger islands in this strait are of special interest to students of the phenomena of love and marriage, for on them it is not only permissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men.  Needless to say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so near Queensland, are not Australians.  They are Melanesians, but their customs are insular and unique.  Curr (I., 279) says of them that they are “with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people who cultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and, un-Australian-like, treat their women with some consideration.”