The Nomadic Alternative – Page 146

another; if, therefore, a stranger has no one to point out to him the vegetable productions, the soil beneath his feet may teem with food while he starves. The same rule holds good with regard to animal productions; for example in the southern parts of the continent the Yanthorrea affords an inexhaustible supply of fragrant grubs, which an epicure would delight in, when once he has so far conquered his prejudices as to taste them ...

... in his own district a native ... knows exactly what it produces, the proper time at which several articles are in season, and the readiest means of procuring them. According to these circumstances he regulates his visits to the different portions of his hunting grounds; and I can only state that I have always found the greatest abundance in their huts. There are, however, two periods in the year when they are, at times, subjected to the pangs of hunger: these are, in the hottest times of summer, and in the height of the rainy season. At the former period the heat renders them so excessively indolent, that until forced by want they will not move, and at the latter, they suffer so severely from the cold and rain, that I have known them remain for two successive days at their huts without quitting the fire ... In all ordinary seasons, however, they can obtain in two or three hours a sufficient supply of food for the day, but their usual custom is to roam indolently from spot to spot, lazily collecting it as they wander along.*

All well-educated hunters subject an amazing variety of plants, animals, minerals and other natural phenomena - USELESS AS WELL AS USEFUL - to a classification of formidable complexity, creating for themselves a world picture and fixing their own place in it. For the natives of Queensland the chirp of a little green frog coincides with the arrival of swifts and announces bad weather on the way.

The natives consult the direction of the wind, the stars, the phases of the moon, and the position of the sun to help them decide when and where a particular medicinal herb will sprout, when a bird migration will come, or when the wild honey will be ready for collecting. As W.E. Roth writes, "Of such importance is a knowledge of the stars to the aborigines in their night journeys, and of the positions denoting the particular seasons of the year, that astronomy is considered one of the principal branches of education."** The Aborigines charted the heavens and named each constellation as we do. The Southern Cross was the "Knot"; the Pleiades "The Flight of Cockatoos", and the Crepuscular Arch in the east at sunset "The Twilight of the White Cockatoos". The position of the stars was

*Sir George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia during the Years 1837, 38, and 39, in 2 vols., London, 1841, pp. 259 foll.
**W.E. Roth, Ethnological Studies among the North-West Central Queensland Aborigines, 1897, p.