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24 men were gaily adorned with pipe-clay painted faces, a head dress of swan’s feathers, a necklace of reeds, and a bone or reed thrust fancifully through the septum of their nostrils.” The only notice of the ladies is this , “ One woman only was seen, who retired by desire of the men on our approach.” The men were seen not to have their front tooth out like their neighbours at Sydney. The straw baskets were praised more than their spears, or their intelli gence ; for says our writer, “ I should imagine the kangaroos out of the reach of their weapons or their ingenuity.” As to their vanity, he tells us, “ The Parisian beau cannot take greater pains in adjusting his hair, and perfume himself with the odours of the East, than the savage does in bedaubing his face with clays, or anointing his skin with the blubber of a whale.” THE FRENCH AND THE BLACKS IN 1803. Peron, the naturalist on board Admiral Baudin’s French dis covery ship, Geographe, gives about the earliest notice of our Aborigines. Entering Flinders’ Western Port in 1803, the Frenchmen named an island Frenchman, now French. It was there that Peron had his first interview with our natives, most probably the first of the kind, excepting the glance with which Flinders had been favoured some weeks before in Port Phillip Bay. Though short the description, it is important. “ Such of the natives they saw seemed mistrustful and perfidious. In their features, the shape of the head, the smoothness and great length of the hair, the inhabitants differ from D’Entrecasteaux Channel. (Tasmania.) They paint their body and face with stripes, crosses, white and red circles; and pierce the nostrils, through which they thrust a small stick six or seven inches long, like the Aborigi nes of Port Jackson. They wear collar fashion a sort of necklace, formed of a number of short tubes of coarse straw. They blacken their body and face with powdered charcoal. Of thirteen individ uals seen, one only was clothed with a black skin, the other twelve being wholly naked.”
