John Smith wrote on Dec 31
st, 2024 at 1:47pm:
Boris wrote on Dec 31
st, 2024 at 5:47am:
It happened - even up to the 1990s and still goes on now I believe
I believe you are a moron, and your posts prove it. You've been searching for evidence for over a year and you fail each and every time. How does it feel to be such a loser?
Dollypot, Greenhide and Spindrift:
a journal of bush history
Vol 3. No. 4
Australian Aboriginal Cannibalism. An eyewitness account.
This account certainly knocks the ‘ritual’ aspects so often promoted. It is from Fisher’s Colonial Magazine, vol.2, page 144, 1843.
Mr. Bromfield, of Geelong, gives a deplorable account of one of these tribal feuds, which, if the aborigines be so few in number as government functionaries represent, may be the more easily prevented
“On the 31st of May last, (writes this gentleman from his residence, Ion Court,) two parties of aborigines encountered each other within a mile and a half of my station – part of the Barrabool Hill natives, and part of the Mount Rouse tribe, who immediately gave battle, but were defeated with the loss of three men and two unfortunate young women. On the Wednesday morning, the few natives immediately belonging to my neighbourhood arrived, bearing this intelligence, evidently in a state of great excitement, and dreadfully afraid to return to their encampment without the protection of myself and servants, who were to be well armed. Directly after breakfast I started, accompanied by the natives to within a short distance of their huts, where they all remained, and I proceeded forward by myself, and on reaching the spot found their report to be perfectly correct. Such a disgusting scene can scarcely be imagined, the whole encampment deluged with blood ; first lay the body of a middle-aged man named Codjajah, speared through the breast in many places, his bowels taken out and the fat drawn off them, and a few pieces cut out of his thigh. The next body was that of a woman speared in many places, quite dead. A short distance from her stood a young lubra with two spears through the belly, the whole of her intestines hanging to the ground – she was perfectly sensible, and it would ave been a charity to have shot her then, but she departed this life in the evening. Besides these three, within a short distance of the huts lay the bodies of two more men, known by the names of Jim and Big-one Tom, they were partly eaten, their fat being taken by their Christian brethren ! These are civilized aborigines, who have been well instructed by our assistant protectors, and certainly have profited no little by the time and expense that have been lavished upon them.”
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The first case was at Apawandinna, halfway from Cowarie. A very fat Blackfellow chased an emu and became overheated in the chase, and died. The other Blackfellows were very worried over the death. They examined the man, but could not find anything to show as a cause of his death. He was a good-natured man, very popular with the tribe, so that it was unlikely that he had been ‘boned’ – a form of magic widely practised among the Wonkonguru tribe.
Finally, the old men of the tribe decided to cook the body. They cut it up and distributed it right round the camps of the tribe, which at that time extended from Killalpaninna to Birdsville in Queensland. The idea of the old men was that if the dead man had been ‘boned,’ his flesh would poison the man who had ‘boned’ him, and anyone who was innocent would be protected from such a death by eating a piece of him. I talked it over with one old man who had eaten it in order that the rest would not think him guilty of ‘boning’ the dead man. He put it to me this way: ‘’Spose ‘em me no eat ‘em. ‘Nother fella say, Him kill ‘em. Me eat ‘em, then all right.’
Horne, G. and Aiston, G., members of the Australian Mounted Police, Savage Life in Central Australia, Macmillan, 1924.
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There is no doubt that cannibalism existed among them until recent times, and possibly in such dangerous areas as Arnhem Land, in the far north of Northern Territory, may exist to this day. Motives for the eating of human flesh, as elsewhere, are varied, and often closely intertwined. The need for sacrifice; the demands of magic; the desire for revenge; all these are present, as elsewhere; but in the case of the Blackfellows they are perhaps less clearly evolved and crystallized.
Garry Hogg, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, p. 179. 1958
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The eating of human flesh was not practised by the Australian native to the extent that it was by the South Sea Islander. The term ‘cannibalism’ is usually taken to mean gorging on human flesh, and with relish; and that seems a valid description of the cannibalism of the Melanesian indigènes of New Caledonia, who appear to have regarded man-meat much as we regard the Sunday-joint. Not all cannibalism is the same in purpose.
In hard summers, the new-born children were all eaten by the Kaura tribe in the neighbourhood of Adelaide, according to Dr McKinley. In 1933 I was able to talk to old men who had eaten human flesh. The chief of Yam Island described to me how he had eaten finely-chopped man-meat mixed with crocodile-meat, at his initiation. He added that it had made him sick. The purpose, as he put it, was ‘to make heart come strong inside.’
In the Wotjobaluk tribe, a couple who already had a child might kill their new-born and feed its muscle-flesh to the other one to
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