and useless.

DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES; MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE NATIVES.

We found this part of the Morumbidgee much more populous than its upper
branches. When we halted, we had no fewer than forty-one natives with us,
of whom the young men were the least numerous. They allowed us to choose
a place for ourselves before they formed their own camp, and studiously
avoided encroaching on our ground so as to appear troublesome. Their
manners were those of a quiet and inoffensive people, and their appearance
in some measure prepossessing. The old men had lofty foreheads, and stood
exceedingly erect. The young men were cleaner is their persons and were
better featured than any we had seen, some of them having smooth hair and
an almost Asiatic cast of countenance. On the other hand, the women and
children were disgusting objects. The latter were much subject to
diseases, and were dreadfully emaciated. It is evident that numbers of
them die in their infancy for want of care and nourishment. We remarked
none at the age of incipient puberty, but the most of them under six. In
stating that the men were more prepossessing than any we had seen, I would
not be understood to mean that they differed in any material point either
from the natives of the coast, or of the most distant interior to which I
had been, for they were decidedly the same race, and had the same leading
features and customs, as far as the latter could be observed. The sunken
eye and overhanging eyebrow, the high cheek-bone and thick lip, distended
nostrils, the nose either short or acquiline, together with a stout bust
and slender extremities, and both curled and smooth hair, marked the
natives of the Morumbidgee as well as those of the Darling. They were
evidently sprung from one common stock, the savage and scattered
inhabitants of a rude and inhospitable land. In customs they differed in
no material point from the coast natives, and still less from the tribes
on the Darling and the Castlereagh. They extract the front tooth,
lacerate their bodies, to raise the flesh, cicatrices being their chief
ornament; procure food by the same means, paint in the same manner, and
use the same weapons, as far as the productions of the country will allow
them. But as the grass-tree is not found westward of the mountains, they
make a light spear of a reed, similar to that of which the natives of the
southern islands form their arrows. These they use for distant combat, and
no