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Boris
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There is overwhelming evidence
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.
b) The conditions of life in Australia caused early and pre¬ mature senility to appear amongst the women: they would became mothers at a very early age but would usually relatively early cease to bear children. An Australian woman would be fertile for an average period of about fifteen years, and probably only very rarely was this period extended to twenty years.
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