It is quite remarkable how the inhabitants of these scrub hamlets manage to travel to and from their habitations, for years sometimes, without leaving anything like a beaten track which might attract the notice of a passing foe.
The huts comprising the village into which the hunters are now entering are of the universal pattern affected by Australian aborigines throughout their great island home. Their form resembles that of a half-spread mushroom or a very squat beehive. But instead of being plastered over with red or yellow clay, as are the domiciles of the natives of the open country, these gunyahs are simply but securely thatched with palm-leaves.
This common type of dwelling is worth notice as being rather remarkable. One might have expected to have found that the present race of Australian natives, who are unmistakably the descendants of Papuan immigrants, who have intermarried with an inferior and puny aboriginal race, would have copied the well-built houses of their near neighbours and relatives the New Guinea blacks. Both races of people have the same name for the land they inhabit, calling each Daudée, and many of their marriage laws and religious ordinances show a common and probably Indian origin,—the occasional worship of the crocodile (_Sebara_) and snake being a case in point.
Possibly these small houses were necessitated by the absence of the bamboo, which supplied their foreign ancestors with such splendid building material. And the form of the dwellings may have originally been devised to imitate the spinifax-crowned mounds so common upon the sand-hills of the plain country, for to combine the advantages of an elevated position and one of comparative obscurity in a village would be a distinct gain to a community in a savage land from the increased protection they would afford.
A few shrivelled old crones, who are sitting scraping and scratching themselves at the entrances to their several residences, commence a low howl of welcome upon seeing the good things brought by the returning hunters, and presently other men and women appear upon the scene—the latter carrying their fat, bright-eyed offspring in elegantly shaped wicker-baskets, which are made so as to be conveniently carried in the hollow of the back by bands of plaited grass passed round the forehead. Several brilliantly painted shields for use in native _boorers_ (tournaments) and wooden dishes are scattered about, and a curiously carved stick—a sort of almanac, which is the property of the old man or father of the village—stands in front of a large gunyah at one end of the semi-circle of dwellings. A meal is now prepared by the younger women, consisting chiefly of such dainties as the roasted flesh of wallabys and a big kind of carpet-snake, which has been preserved till tender by being kept under water for some days, with a few side-dishes of grasshoppers, roasted grubs, wild-figs (_yanki_), and various kinds of berries; and these delicacies being consumed, Billy proceeds to disclose the object of his visit. Whilst speaking, however, he judiciously distributes some brilliantly coloured handkerchiefs to the male villagers, who are chewing an aromatic kind of resin, obtained from a scrub tree much resembling the kauri (_dammara_) of New Zealand. After a great amount of talk, in which the women join at times, one of the runaway station boys and a tall, long-legged _Myall_ finally agree to return with Billy, and the old father of the little community brings the business to a close by observing, “_Vai mollie moungarn_,”—intimating thereby that the sun is fast declining towards the mountain tops, and that the men had better start at once.