Famine Foods

More difficult than finding a wife in the pays d'en haut to cook one's rations was the problem of obtaining an adequate and dependable supply of food itself. It was one of Henry's problems at Pembina; it was one that extended right up to Headquarters. The vast organization of trading posts, supply systems, and communications known as the North West Company existed, of course, for only one thing: beaver. But you couldn't eat beaver - or, at least, their pelts, or the hats into which they were finally made. And how to feed a thousand-odd men and their families in more than a hundred posts, and on their long wilderness journeys, was one of the Concern's biggest worries.

With the fur trader himself, it wasn't so much a question of how well he ate as of whether he ate at all. He was often on short rations, and the dread of famine hung over every post. Scattered through every trader's journal are such routine phrases as, "We were reduced to eating the parchment bille of our windows." or "We dined on a pair of leather breches." or "We were obliged to take the hair from the bear skins and roast the hide, which tastes like pork."

The eating of one's leather garments , sometimes broiled, sometimes boiled up into a glutinous broth - was so common in times of dire need, in fact, that it received no more than casual mention in the Nor'westers' journals. Thus, W. F Wentzel, writing at his post on the Mackenzie River, said what he and twelve others lived for two months on nothing but dried beaver skins: "We destroyed in order to keep alive upward of three hundred beaver skins besides a few lynx and otter skins . . . We have a meal now and then; at intervals we are still two or three days without anything. All my men are dead of starvation, viz: Louis Le mai dit Poudrier and one of his children, François Pilon and William Henry, my hunter."

Other last resorts in the way of food were the old bones of animals or fish, which were cracked open and boiled; the spawn of fish, beaten up in warm water; and various herbs, low in food value, but capable of sustaining life, such as the often mentioned choux-gras of the prairie. Daniel Harmon tells of subsisting on rosebuds, "a kind of food neither very palatable nor nourishing . . . They are better than nothing, since they would just support life."

But the standard emergency ration of nature, mentioned by the very earliest missionaries and explorers, was a rock lichen called tripe de roche. It was necessary to close one's eyes while eating it, an early father remarks, but it filled the stomach, if nothing else. The elder Henry describes its preparation, "which is done by boiling it down into a mucilage, as thick as the white of an egg."

The distressing results of eating tripe de roche are vividly pictured by the free trader John Long: "Tripe de roche is a weed that grows to rocks, of a spongy nature and very unwholesome, causing violent pains in the bowels, and frequently occasions a flux. I am informed that traders in the Northwest have often experienced this disorder, and some of them in very severe weather have been compelled to eat it for fourteen days successively, which weakened them considerably. When the disorder does not terminate in a flux, it occasions violent vomiting, and sometimes spitting of blood, with acute spasms of the bowels."

Hardly the sort of dish one would care to serve often - yet it was not the last extremity of desperate men. For, as the elder Henry darkly hints, cannibalism was not unknown in the fur country. John Long, anything but a squeamish reporter, again tells of a starving voyageur who killed and ate not only a harmless Indian who had brought him food, but one of his two companions as well. Tricked into a confession of his guilt, he was summarily shot through the head by his bourgeois.

This brings us to the subject of plant-food. 

Grey says that a species of flag was cultivated in West Australia, at any rate to the extent of burning it, in order to improve the next crop. He describes exten- sive yam grounds on the Hutt River, but it does not follow that these were artificial. The evidence of Gregory, however, leaves no doubt that there was actual cultivation on the west coast. He says that the natives, when they dug up yams, replaced the heads {fourn. Antli. hist., xvi. 131), and this can only be described as cultivation. The cultivation of purslane {Portulacd) seems to be a well-established fact. It is grown like melons on slightly raised mounds ; before the seed vessels are ripe, the plant is cut, turned upside down and dried in the sun ; then the seed vessels are plucked and rubbed down and the seed collected. Many pounds' weight can be collected in a day, even where there is no cultivation, and the cakes from it are far more nutritious than the well-known nardoo cakes, on which Burke and Wills tried to subsist. 

To describe in detail the vegetable food of the Australian aborigines would demand far more space than can be here allotted to the subject. Probably they employ as food at least three hundred species of vegetables, using the roots or tubers, the pith, the leaves, the fruits, kernels or husks, the seeds, and the gum, according to the species. Often more than one product is in use from a single species. 

When other food is scarce nardoo is the stand-by of the natives in the centre of Australia, but its nutritive properties are small. Of all the fruits eaten by the natives the most remarkable is perhaps the bunya- bunya nut. It is found in a limited area behind Brisbane, and bears fruit in abundance only once in three years. It is ripe in January, and tribes come from a distance for the feast ; each has its own trees ; in fact, each family owns one or more. The nut is roasted in the fire ; it is also placed in a water-hole and eaten after germination. Zamia nuts {Cycas media) form an important article of diet in many parts ; in its raw state it is poisonous. The shell is taken off the nuts, which are broken, pounded, and left in a dilly bag for four or five days in running water ; when they are soft enough they are pounded and baked under the ashes. Grey gives a somewhat different account. He says they are soaked, after being gathered in March, then they are placed in holes in the sand, where they remain till the pulp is quite dry. They are eaten raw or roasted, and in the latter state taste quite as nice as a chestnut. The yam {dioscored) is also highly important ; in some districts the holes from which the natives have dug them cover miles of ground. It is generally considered the province of the women to dig roots, but in some parts the men do so too, in which case the produce is reserved for their use. To get a yam half an inch in circumference and a foot in length, a hole has to be dug about a foot square and two feet deep. To do this the women have only a pointed stick ; this they drive firmly into the ground and shake it, so as to loosen the earth, which they scoop up and throw out with great rapidity with the fingers of the left hand. The roots are eaten raw or roasted ; but in West Australia the natives always mix it with an earth before eating it, alleging that it otherwise is apt to cause dysentery. In Queensland it is washed, baked for four hours, and mashed up in a grass dilly bag ; it is then strained through the dilly bag into a bark trough, in which the bag also remains until only fibre is left in it. Then the mash is washed, sometimes with seven or eight different waters. As soon as the washing is com- pleted a hole is dug in some sandy place and lined with clean sand ; into this the semi-liquid mass is poured, and when all the water has drained off, it looks much like tinned potato, according to Dr. Roth. 

Morrell, the English sailor who was captive among the Queensland natives many years ago, gives an account of the way in which the fruit of Avicennia officinalis was prepared ; a hole was dug and stones heated in the fire arranged on the bottom ; on this was put the fruit and water sprinkled over it ; then bark was put on the top and it was baked for two hours ; a second hole was dug, the fruit put in, water poured over it twice, and it was ready for eating. 

The bean-tree, or Moreton Bay chestnut, is prepared by being steeped eight or ten days ; then it is dried in the sun, roasted on hot stones and pounded ; mixed with water, it is made into thin cakes and baked. 

Solanum hystrix, known as walga in South Australia, is prepared in a curious way ; it is pounded and mixed with congoo, i.e. mallee root bark ; then the shell and seeds are removed and a cake made. When the fruit was not obtainable, the blacks bled themselves and mixed blood and bark into cakes. 

Mylitta australis, a kind of truffle, sometimes called native bread, was eaten in Victoria and possibly elsewhere. In West Australia the natives obtained from the acacias a kind of gum, called kwonnat, and on the grounds where this was obtainable assembled large crowds and held their annual markets. 

A kind of bulrush was largely eaten in South Australia ; it was prepared by being cooked between two stones ; it was to them what bread is to the European. It was cooked on a heap of limestone with wood laid on the top ; another layer of heated stones was placed on these and then wet grass to make steam ; a mound of earth completed the oven. After chewing the bulrush root they spat out the fibrous part, which they converted into rope for fishing-lines, nets, etc. The mussel was usually eaten with the bulrush root. 

This brief survey has not touched on a tithe of the important food-plants, but some idea will have been gained of the extent of the Australian garden and of the complication of the cooking processes ; indeed one may well wonder by what process they arrived at these ingenious processes, especially in the case of poisonous substances. 

It is often asserted that the Australian does not store food ; this is as untrue as that he does not cultivate his soil. Much of his food he must perforce eat quickly, or natural processes would make his labour in vain. But the bunya-bunya nut, grass and other seed cakes, and possibly other kinds of food, were certainly put aside for future use. 

Before we leave the subject of vegetable products mention must be made of pituri, a remarkable plant, the botanical name of which is Diiboisia Hopwoodii. It does not grow in all districts, and is the most important article of commerce. As soon as it is ready — it flowers in January — that is to say about March, messengers are sent, sometimes hundreds of miles, with spears, boomerangs, nets and other wares, to exchange for the pituri, which is in the form of half-green, half- yellow tea with plenty of chips in it. After roasting them on the ashes the chips become pliable and are wetted, teased up with the fingers, and the larger frag- ments removed. Some acacia leaves are then heated over the fire and then burnt ; the ashes are mixed with pituri and the whole worked up into quids about 2| inches long by f inch diameter. These are chewed, and when not in use are carried behind the ear. 

Sometimes pituri is taken before fighting, but its use is common to all classes and both sexes ; it seems to produce a voluptuous, dreamy sensation. Tobacco is now in use among the blacks, of course of European importation, and they are said to smoke pituri when the supply runs short. It is said that the native women use a species of Goodenia to make their children sleep when they are on a long journey.

Among articles of diet may also be mentioned clay, which is eaten without preparation, both in times of scarcity and as dessert after an ordinary meal. Honey was not the only sweet substance known to the Australians. In various parts a sweet secretion, probably of a species of Psylla, was collected from the trees, and sometimes eaten, sometimes infused in water and fermented. It was gathered in the summer and eaten with various kinds of animal food. A fermented drink was also prepared from the fruit of the pandanus. In a dry and thirsty land like Australia the European is naturally at a loss for water ; but the native has many ingenious methods of obtaining it, and can live comfortably where a white man would perish miserably. In many places are found what are called native wells — narrow deep holes, the position of which is known to the natives, for otherwise they would hardly be able to find them. But when these holes and ordinary water-holes fail them, they are far from being at the end of their resources. In the mallee scrub they dig down and get pieces of root some eighteen inches long ; there is plenty of water in this, which, when the root is turned on its end, drains out into a vessel placed beneath. Where the pandanus- tree grows the moisture below the surface is tested by pushing a spear three or four feet into the ground ; if the point is moist, a bunch of dry grass is rammed down ; this acts as a strainer, and the water is sucked up with a reed. Sometimes the base of the Melaleuca- tree bulges out ; when this is cut open it is found to contain a pint or two of water. Where real water is not obtainable the native refreshes himself with a sweet substance from a Sterculia. They also cut holes in the trunk ; the water lodges in these holes and rots the inside of the tree. When water is wanted they cut a foot or two below the original incision and obtain an abundant supply from their reservoir.

One day, in the heat of April, there appeared before my tent a naked woman and her crippled son. They had walked for a thousand miles, from Mingana Water, beyond the border of Western and South Australia, after having been abandoned in the desert by a mob of thirty wild cannibals. The woman’s husband was dead, and her name was Nabbari. She had a firestick, a wooden scoop for digging out animal burrows, and her digging-stick, pointed at one end. Her boy, Marburning, carried a broken spear to help him in his lameness, but Nabbari had carried him most of the way.

Following the tracks, as the mobs had turned hither and thither in their search of food and water, so Nabbari zigzagged with the boy, often forced to retrace her steps. Four seasons, each with its own special foods, had passed in her travels and never in all that time was her firestick allowed to go out; for it is forbidden to women to make fires.

Day after day small fires were lighted to cook snakes and rabbits and bandicoots, lizards and iguanas, and every living thing that provided a mouthful. They killed many dingoes, and even their pet puppies, but the little boy clung lovingly to the last one. When meat supplies faded, they lived upon edible grubs and honey, ants, and beetles, and wong-unu (a grass), the seeds of which Nabbari masticated before she cooked them when there was no water. In the arid areas she found moisture in the mallee-roots, and shook the heavy dew-drops into her weera from the small bushes and herbage so that she and her boy throve on the long journey.

Many times they came upon the scene of old fights, or the hidden places of the manhood ceremonies—of these they would make a wide detour—or an orphan water where, after she had drunk of it, Nabbari would set up her death-wail. But the live tracks of her relatives who had preceded her were always visible, and from them she gained courage to follo

Cannibalism had been rife for centuries in these regions and for a thousand miles north and east of them. When I made inquiries regarding the murder of Baxter (who accompanied Eyre in 1843) by the two Port Lincoln boys who stole the stores and fled back to their own country, I was told that they did not get very far before they themselves were killed and eaten. While these blacks had been under the protection of the whites, they were safe enough, but the moment they left them, they were descended upon and killed. Some years before my arrival, two white men, Fairey and Woolley, had mysteriously disappeared in this country, but of this comparatively recent affair, the natives would give me no information. I did hear of one instance of cannibalism at the white man’s expense, a shepherd whose name is known to me, found dead in the country to westward, with his thigh cut away.

Between Eucla and Eyre a group of six-fingered and six-toed natives existed. They had been seen by Helms as late as the ‘sixties, and though they were extinct in my time, I learned both from the natives at Eucla and from Mr. Chichester Beadon, that they had come from the Petermann Ranges, and had intermarried with the five-fingered groups. These six-fingered men were believed to transmit their peculiarity to their off-spring, as were the left-handed groups that I have myself often encountered.

The last manhood ceremony of Eucla was held in 1913, when Gooradoo, a boy of the turkey totem, was initiated at Jeegala Creek, some sixteen miles north. A great crowd of natives straggled in by degrees, remnants from all round the plain’s edge, from Fraser Range, Boundary Dam, Israelite Bay, as far east as Penong, and as far north as Ayer’s Rock, in the very heart of Australia, 700 miles and more of foot-travelling. There were numbers of women among them, as in all these gatherings an exchange of women is an important part of the ceremony. For the ceremony there must have been more than 200 assembled.

In physique these border natives were fine sturdy fellows. In their own country they were cannibals to a man. “We are Koogurda,” they told me, and frankly admitted the hunting and sharing of kangaroo and human meat as frequently as, that of kangaroo and emu. The Baduwonga of Boundary Dam drank the blood of those they had killed. The Kaalurwonga, cast of the Badu, were a fierce arrogant tribe who pursued fat men, women and girls, and cooked the dead by making a deep hole in the sand, trussing the body and there roasting it, and tossing it about until it cooled sufficient for them to divide it. Another group would cut off hand and foot, and partake of these first, to prevent the ghost from following and spearing them spiritually.

Although they camped about me for many days, I was sufficiently acquainted with their disposition and their custom to know that my own position was secure. All knew of kabbarli and her grandmotherly magic, and I look upon this exciting period at Eucla as one of the most illuminating contacts with this primitive race that I have ever made.