Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central Australia And Overland From Adelaide To King George's Sound In The Years 1840-1: Sent By The Colonists Of South Australia By Eyre, Edward John
- Page 767 of 914 - First - Home
After Taking The Centre Of The Circle, Tenberry Called For A Spear, But
No One Offered One, He Therefore Took A Long One From A Native In The
Ring, Who Had Evidently Brought It For That Purpose And Yielded It
Unresistingly.
Pacing with this weapon furiously up and down the circle,
he advanced and retreated before the accused, brandishing the spear at
them, and alternately threatening and wailing.
No one replied, but the
melancholy dirge was still kept up by the widows in the rear.
After sufficiently exciting himself in this manner for some time, he
advanced with uplifted spear, and successively repeating his blows
speared four or five persons among the accused natives in the left arm,
each of them pushing forward his arm unflinchingly for the blow as he
advanced upon them. Tenberry now again hung down his head and took up his
lamentation for a short time, after which he paced about rapidly,
vehemently haranguing, and violently gesticulating, and concluded by
ordering all the natives present to separate their camps, and each tribe
to make their own apart.
Mourning is performed by the men by cutting their beards [Note 84 at end
of para.] and hair, and daubing the head and breast with a white pigment;
among the women, by cutting and burning the hair close off [Note 85 at
end of para.] to the head and plastering themselves with pipe-clay.
In some cases, hot ashes are put upon the head to singe the hair to
its very roots, and they then literally weep "in dust and ashes." Among
some of the Murray tribes, a mourning cap is worn by the women, made two
or three inches thick of carbonate of lime.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 767 of 914
Words from 213849 to 214134
of 254601
