Aboriginal Child-Eating was / is well known - hundreds of reports from people who witnessed it including Daisy Bates who lived with them.
Its all in the History Books:
Pages 122, 124, 125, 139-141
It is evident that numbers of them die in their infancy from want of care and nourishment.” 4 And if the babe did not perish by the hand of its mother immediately after birth, if it did not die prematurely of an illness, more than one danger still lay in ambush for it. And thus, here and there child-murder was committed not only from necessity but also for reasons of mere gluttony. The existence of this eating of children is testified to by all too numerous facts:5 6 7 Mowbray relates that he personally found in the basin of the river Mitchell the aborigines roasting and eating their own children.0 When a child looks well, is “well-fed” or “fat”, it may happen that one of the men, or even the whole community, murders it for cannibalistic purposes in the absence of its mother. It has even occurred that if the mother, fearing for the life of her child, would not leave the camp, she would be induced to go out¬ side on some pretext or other and her absence taken advantage of.' We do not think that such cannibalism was common, though there are many references to it, but even those infrequent cases had some effect on the growth of the population, in view of the small size of the tribe. (Another factor has more influence: children were killed during long journeys. At such times carrying the children became burdensome to the mother, especially in conjunc¬ tion with being short of provisions.)1 It was only in periods of drought and famine that child-eating assumed large proportions. That which in the ordinary course of events was somebody’s caprice, became then a general practice. “It is during these trying times that parents are obliged to resort to extreme measures, so that they may sustain the lives of their children. Driven to the verge of despair, and visibly moved at the thought of it, a father must occasionally make the decision to slay one child in order that another may be saved.”2 In hard summers the new-born child¬ ren seem to be all eaten in the Kaura tribe — A. W. Howitt infered this from remarkable gaps that appeared in the ages of the children.3 4 * 6 7 It even came to that, as in the Birria tribe during the years 1876 — ’77, in the drought, not only were all the infants devoured, but even the younger grown children.1 However, in some tribes this practice appeared, even in a normal period, not to be so very rare. At least, if the gossip that circulated among the tribes were to be believed, cannibalism was even more extensive than we suppose. For instance, one tribe relates of another that it marks at birth those infants which are to be eaten later on;'1 again, the children of some women were always killed and eaten as soon as they got fat enough.3 According to Machattie, a tribe numbering 250 souls when the Europeans came, during six years ate seven children, i.e., about 5% of its whole population.' Sometimes the eating of children was the result of superstition — a mother restored her health with the blood or flesh of her own child. It is perhaps from such a reason that the practices of the Polish peasants in the dis¬ trict of Tykocin originate: if the woman’s pains in her confine¬ ment do not cease, she is given “navel-drink,” i. e., a glass of vodka, with which is mingled a thimbleful of blood from the navel and to which some salt is also added.1
3. We must ultimately arrive at the conclusion that even a small but constant and general increase in the population of Aus¬ tralia was almost out of . the question. But the great mortality of children (and infanticide) was not the sole cause of this, as the following review of the influences at work will show:
a) A young girl, often very young and hardly out of child¬ hood, would he given to a husband who in many cases would be considerably older than she. In Tasmania, a gray-headed old man possessed three wives aged respectively thirty, seventeen and ten years.2 Such families probably were by no means uncommon in Australia. In many cases the difference in age between husband and wife was so great that it necessarily had to react adversely on the fertility of the woman. Again with the early marriage of a girl, especially if the husband were an old man, the first child was often weak and frail and so was doomed to an early death under Australian conditions.
https://archive.org/details/b29980112/page/138/mode/2up
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The Australian Wars - Culture is Life (Read 10196 times)
