# The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII.
OF THEIR loondthals (HUTS), AND MODE OF CONSTRUCTION; THE COINCIDENCES EXISTING BETWEEN PRE-HISTORICAL MAN AND THESE ABORIGINES, AS SHOWN BY VARIOUS IMPLEMENTS, &c.
It is just possible, by the stretch of a very fertile imagination to assign the name of village to an assemblage of aboriginal huts, but such a liberty with the English language could only be permitted to one possessing a highly poetical organisation, as a number of these habitations gathered together in one spot is merely an encampment, and one of the very rudest too.
There is never the slightest attempt at order in the arrangement or placing of these primitive defences against the weather, each one being erected according to the necessity ​fancies of the builder or intending occupant, the only rule observed being that the back of each loondthal faces the windward. In this matter, though, they merely display the same instinctive promptings which are to be seen every day amongst the lower orders of creation, as even a sheep will select the lea side of a bush to make its lair in severe weather. All aboriginal loondthals are constructed after one fashion, which three sides of a bee hive, with the fourth lacking, very aptly illustrates.
In cold, rough weather the huts are made of bark, placed over a light framework of poles, all the top ends thereof resting together in a forked pole, which latter divides the front or open space of the habitation into two equal parts. Should bark be difficult to procure, the framework is covered with boughs or coarse grass, so as to be impervious to any moderate rain, but in boisterous, bitter weather these offer but a sorry protection against the elements.
During the warm and mild weather each family merely puts a few boughs in a semicircular form round the fire, and this is done more with the view of preventing the fire from being blown about by the wind than for any shelter which they are supposed to afford.
The building of the loondthals fall entirely upon the shoulders of the women—that is to say, any men having women folks in their families would disdain to aid in the erection of their dwellings. With the enforced bachelors, and such youths as club together, the matter is very different. They, of course, have to build their own huts, as well as do every other domestic duty for themselves.
​When a man has two wives many quarrels arise between them on those hut building occasions. We remember seeing a dispute between two ladies of one lord over the erection of a loondthal, which all the husband's marital authority failed to accommodate. It therefore culminated in a fair stand-up fight, yamsticks being the weapons used, and their method of using them is no child's play either, as they lay on with all their might; so in this instance broken and gory heads were soon visible. After a very fierce encounter one gave in beaten, and the construction of the loondthal went on to completion, after which, however, a wordy phase of the disagreement supervened, until their long tongues and vituperative expletives fairly roused the angry passions of their lord and master (who was seated between the dark-skinned combatants) till his savage nature could no longer bear the infliction; therefore he jumped up and caught hold of the centre pole, to which he gave a sudden jerk, and thus let the whole fabric down on the heads of his rival dearies, thereby putting a climax to their clatter. Satisfied with the result so suddenly achieved, he walked off to a neighbouring loondthal, where he passed the time in pleasant aboriginal gossip until his termagant helpmates had re-erected his dwelling and got rid of their bad blood, by means of the healthy and arduous occupation which their husband had so unceremoniously thrust upon them.
There are neither castes nor grades amongst these people of any kind, all being equal in the matter of social status. This being so, there is not any cogent enough reason to cause one hut to be made more pretentious than another, as ​would most undoubtedly be the case did gradations of rank obtain amongst them, nor do they possess any traditions tending to show that there ever existed a better, or indeed any other, order of architecture than the very primitive style which is now, and, as far as can be ascertained, always has been followed by the whole of the aboriginal tribes of the Australian Continent. They are a people who seem to have come to a standstill in some remote age, and who remain in the same fixed groove, even to the present day, thus positively nullifying the old and accepted axiom, "That which is not moving forwards must necessarily be retrograding."
In the history of the colony so far nothing in the shape of remains have been discovered denoting the former existence of a higher order of men than is seen in the present low type, notwithstanding the wide area of country which has been turned over whilst searching for auriferous deposits. Properly considering this important fact, it is but fair to suppose that these people are descended from a primitive race, and that that race was either a separate creation or a family who, in the long-forgotten past, had been driven away by adverse winds from the coasts of their own country, off which they might have been engaged fishing, when the wind arose which carried them to Australia.
Our inclination certainly tends towards the latter theory, by reason of the stone axes, spear barbs, and kitchen middens of these aborigines being precisely similar to those of the primitive races which flourished in the ​prehistoric ages. Of course we do not mean to imply that the people from whom these aborigines have descended were driven half way round the globe by adverse winds and currents, until the Australian Continent stayed their further progress. But this we do say, the only arts these Australian aborigines possess, whereby they are enabled to fashion their weapons and other implements, seem to have prevailed in Europe when pre-historic man preyed upon the cave lion, the cave bear, and the woolly rhinoceros; for side by side, with the bones of these primeval artificers, the stone axes, the arrow barbs, and the kitchen middens, have been discovered, thus displaying, if not a decided affinity, a marked similarity, in the long-extinct pre-historic races of Europe, to the existing aboriginal races of Australia; but whether the Australians are actually remnants of the same creation to which the extinct races of Europe belonged, or not, is scarcely in our province to say in any definite manner. We merely place these few analagous points in juxta position, because of the remarkable coincidence thereof.
* ↑ Kitchen midden: Refuse heaps, blackfellows' ovens. All these names signify the same accumulation of domestic debris.
* ↑ See M'Causland's Adam and the Adamites.