Other instances, were recorded, however, of the eating of the
flesh of Aboriginal men, women,
and children; and it would be
untrue to say that all of these acts were performed from
pietistic motives, or out of revenge.
It is the intention of these notes to deal broadly with the
cannibalistic practices carried out by Australian Aborigines
and recorded by observers, to try to draw some conclusions
from them and to endeavour to apply these conclusions to
Queensland examples drawn from 19th Century observers and
archival sources.
R. M. & C. H. Berndt 24 concluded that the practice of
killing the very young seemed to have been carried out
occasionally over almost all Aboriginal AustraUa, but that
infanticide was not invariably followed by eating the flesh.
Howitt 25 found instances where
young children were eaten by
members of the Kaura tribe near Adelaide during hard
summers; and where the flesh of young children of the
Wotjobaluk tribe was eaten by their elder brothers and sisters
to make them strong.26 He reported also 2? that all the tribes
of the Wotjo nation and on the Murray River frontage used
at times, when an older child was weak and sickly, to kill its
infant brother or sister and feed it on the flesh. Bates 2«
also recorded examples of the practice of infant cannibalism
by the desert tribes of South and Western AustraUa.
Thomas 2^ recorded a case on the Gascoigne River in Western
Australia where an Aboriginal girl was killed and eaten by
a native who decoyed her away. "She was very plump; the
object of killing her was to acquire this desirable quality".
Bleakle> ^^ also referred to "rare cases .. . of the killing and
eating of a young girl on a special ritual occasion"; but his
information is not documented. Bates ^"^ wrote of the
Kaalurwonga east of the Boundary Dam who killed and ate
fat men, women, and girls. Elsewhere she stated ^°^ that
"wanton women in any camp" (i.e., among the West Australian
desert tribes) could be lawfully killed and eaten, and this
may be a key to the motivation for some cannibalistic practices
of this nature.
The practice of eating the flesh of the very young followed
the same general pattern in the survey area as in the rest of
Australia. Writing of his sojourn in the Maroochy and Noosa
areas in the Eighteen Sixties, Thorne '4 recorded instances of
the killing and eating of young female Aboriginal and half caste
children. In one instance he was informed, "It was always
crying, and was not a boy". One concludes from reading
Thorne that infant cannibalism was most likely to take place
in this area during a wet season, when game was scarce. Roth ^5,
Kennedy 57, and Lumholtz'^
showed that the practice was observed in the inland areas of Queensland during the Eighties
and Nineties when food was in short supply. Rudder ^^ noted
instances of the practice in the Maryborough district in the
Eighteen Sixties, the Aborigines believing that the spirit of
the child went back to the mother. "Mother altogether got 'im".
This supports the belief that even when infantile cannibalism
was practised during hard seasons a certain ritual was observed
and the motivation was not wholly dietetic.
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