Don't call me a liar - a mariner on the First Fleet - saw nothing but it was recorded inland.
Australia
While it is generally accepted that some forms of cannibalism were practised in Australia in certain circumstances, the prevalence and meaning of such acts in pre-colonial Aboriginal societies are disputed.
[6] Before colonization, Aboriginal Australians were predominantly nomadic hunter-gatherers at times lacking in protein sources. Reported cases of cannibalism include killing and eating small children (infanticide was widely practised as a means of population control and because mothers had trouble carrying two young children not yet able to walk)[7][8][9] and enemy warriors slain in battle.[10][11][12]
In the late 1920s, the anthropologist Géza Róheim heard from Aboriginals that infanticidal cannibalism had been practised especially during droughts. "Years ago it had been custom for every second child to be eaten" – the baby was roasted and consumed not only by the mother, but also by the older siblings, who benefited from this meat during times of food scarcity. One woman told him that her little sister had been roasted, but denied having eaten of her. Another "admitted having killed and eaten her small daughter", and several other people he talked to remembered having "eaten one of their brothers".[13] The consumption of infants took two different forms, depending on where it was practised:
When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.[14]
Usually only babies who had not yet received a name (which happened around the first birthday) were consumed, but in times of severe hunger, older children (up to four years or so) could be killed and eaten too, though people tended to have bad feelings about this. Babies were killed by their mother, while a bigger child "would be killed by the father by being beaten on the head".[15] But cases of women killing older children are on record too. In 1904 a parish priest in Broome, Western Australia, stated that infanticide was very common, including one case where a four-year-old was "killed and eaten by its mother", who later became a Christian.[16]
Historian William Rubinstein writes that both "deliberate infanticide" and "the practice of the cannibalism of a murdered baby [were] apparently common" in Australia.[17] A number of reports indicate that newborn infants were sometimes killed by their mothers, who then feed the flesh to an older sibling in order to strengthen the older child in that way.[18][19] The Norwegian ethnographer Carl Sofus Lumholtz confirms that infants were commonly killed and eaten especially in times of food scarcity. He notes that people spoke of such acts "as an everyday occurrence, and not at all as anything remarkable."[20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Oceania
Forum
Pages: 
