5

-2-
nutritious and plentiful food supply, and when the fruit was in season,
other tribes were attracted from immense distances to enjoy Nature's
bounty. The scrubs were the haunt of the wawun or scrub-turkeey, known
in Victoria as the Mallee hen.

The forest country was well wooded and abounded in marsupial game
of several varieties. Native bears and possums were very numerous, as
were also kangaroos and wallabies, kangaroo rats and bandicoots. The
streams were plentifully stocked with mulet, cat-fish, barramunda and
eels. Along the sea-shore the usual produce of the Australian tropical
seas was available. Of bird-life there were very many varieties, in-
cluding large forms like the native companion, the ibis, the forest
turkey or bustard, and the emu. The country of the Wakka tribe is more
level and open than that of the Kabi. It has little of the bunya and
pine scrub.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTERS

Without measurements, one can only speak approximately regarding
stature and other physical characters.

The tribes under notice showed no marked divergence in appearance
from the other Queensland natives or from those whom I have seen be-
longing to New South Wales, Victoria, and the south of South Australia.
It would be impossible to distinguish, by appearance, a Kabi or Wakka
native of the darkest complesion from, say, a Victorian native. But
there were among the Kabi some with lighter skins than any I have seen
in Victoria. Two or three of the women were particularly light in
colour. There was a very decided suggestion of a mixture of races.
The women seemed of a higher type than those in the west of Victoria
and the southern extremity of South Australia.

The Kabiand Wakka men were of low stature. The average would not
exceed 5 feet 5 inches. In rare cases a height of about 6 feet was
attained. The range would be from 5 feet 1 inch to 6 feet. in proport-
ion to the men the women were rather tall.

The people were light in the bone. The lower part of the limbs
was usualy fine. The thighs, much more rarely the calves of the legs,
were well developed. The muscles of the back and breast were often
prominent. In walking, the head was thrown well back. The hair of the
head was luxuriant and wavy, it was very fine, someties glossy,
sometimes dull, and in most cases it appeared black to the
casual observer. Some writers have described the Australians as having
straight hair. Even Topinard has made this mistake. I doubt whether
there was a a solitary case of straight hair in the tribes under notice.
One or two had yellowish-brown hair. The beard was abundant and the
breast was usually hirsute. Two men, Tommy Cain, a Kabi black, and
Waruin, whose mother was Kabi and his father Wakka, had hair so pronoun-
cedly curly as to be fitly termed at least frizzy, if not woolly. Strange
the lips of the latter were unusually thick and his nose more negroid than
the general cast. His mother had not those peculiarities, so that he
apparently inherited them from his Wakka ancestry. Of all the natives I
knew, he was the most good-natured, the best-tempered and the happiest,
always smiling and very frequently laughing uproariously. He was indulgent
to his wife and very kind to his horse. A peculiar feature was that on
one foot he had ony four toes.

One boy, Walareyan, was disfigured by a remarkable defect, the arrested
development of one arm. It hung from the shoulder like a fleshy wrist,
terminating in a finger and a thumb. He was one of twins, the other, a
girl, was put to death by her parents at her birth.

Reference has been made to diversity of complexion. A few were a
bronze colour, while the others and notably the short hairy men, women
intensely dark brown. Young children were light in colour but grew [?]
er with age. The blacker the skine the more it was admired, one reason
perhaps for the practice which mothers followed of rubbing their [ne?]
infants with a mixture of powdered charcoal and fat.