possession of the women
"seems to be associated with all their ideas of fighting." The same
impression is conveyed by the writings of Salvado, Wilkes, and
others--Sturt, _e.g._, who wrote (II., 283) that the abduction of a
married or unmarried woman was a frequent cause of quarrel. Mitchell
(I., 330) relates that when some whites told a native that they had
killed a native of another tribe, his first thought and only remark
was, "Stupid white fellows! Why did you not bring away the gins
(women)?" It is unfortunate for a woman to possess the kind of
"beauty" Australians admire for, as Grey says (II., 231),

"The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for
beauty is generally one continued series of captivity
to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings
in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment
from other females amongst whom she is brought a
stranger by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of
unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred
by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus
wanders several hundred miles from the home of her
infancy."

It is not only from other and hostile tribes that these men forcibly
appropriate girls or married women. Among the Hunter River tribes
(Curr, III., 353), "men renowned as warriors frequently attacked their
inferiors in strength and took their wives from them." The Queensland
natives, we are told by Narcisse Peltier, who lived among them
seventeen years, "not unfrequently fight with spears for the
possession of a woman" (Spencer, _P.S._, I., 601). Lumholtz says (184)
that "the majority of the young men wait a long time before they get
wives, partly for the reason that they have not the courage to fight
the requisite duel for one with an older man." On another page (212)
he relates:

"Near Herbert Vale I had the good fortune to be able to
witness a marriage among the blacks. A camp of natives
was just at the point of breaking up, when an old man
suddenly approached a woman, seized her by the wrist of
her left hand and shouted _Yongul ngipa_!--that is,
This one belongs to me (literally 'one I'). She
resisted with feet and hands, and cried, but he dragged
her off, though she made resistance during the whole
time and cried at the top of her voice. For a mile away
we could hear her shrieks.... But the women always make
resista