But little real affection consequently exists between husbands and wives, and young men value a wife principally for her services as a slave; in fact when asked why they are anxious to obtain wives, their usual reply is, that they may get wood, water, and food for them, and carry whatever property they possess.  In 1842 the wife of a native in Adelaide, a girl about eighteen, was confined, and recovered slowly; before she was well the tribe removed from the locality, and the husband preferred accompanying them, and left his wife to die, instead of remaining to attend upon her and administer to her wants.  When the natives were gone, the girl was removed to the mission station, to receive medical attendance, but eventually died.  In the same year an old woman who broke her thigh was left to die, as the tribe did not like the trouble of carrying her about.  Parents are treated in the same manner when helpless and infirm. [Note 77 at end of para.] In 1839 I found an aged man left to die, without fire or food, upon a high bare hill beyond the Broughton.  In 1843 I found two old women, who had been abandoned in the same way, at the Murray, and although they were taken every care of when discovered, they both died in about a week afterwards.  No age is prescribed for matrimony, but young men under twenty-five years of age do not often obtain wives, there are exceptions, however, to this:  I have seen occasionally young men of seventeen or eighteen possessing them.  When wives are from thirty-five to forty years of age, they are frequently cast off by the husbands, or are given to the younger men in exchange for their sisters or near relatives, if such are at their disposal.

[Note 77:  “Practised by the American Indians.”—­Catlin, vol. i. p. 216.

“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, being carried off successively to distant and more distant points.”]

Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands or friends, in addition to the dreadful life of drudgery, and privation, and hardship they always have to undergo; they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences.  No one takes the part of the weak or the injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the infliction of such severe punishments.

Few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear-wounds about the body.  I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds.  Upon this point Captain Grey remarks, vol. ii. p. 249.