39 whom the offending party belongs, or it sometimes happens that the poor girl and her husband are singled out, and in the dead of the night the spear gives both a passport to the laud whose inhabitants live without hunting. The men are prohibited from looking at the mother of the girls promised them in marriage. This singular custom is observed with the strictest caution. On passing the hut of the mother-in-law, or any place where they suppose her to be, they carefully turn their head away, and evince great concern if by any chance they should see her, although I am not aware of any penalty being attached to the offence save that of displeasing the parents. On meeting with Nullaboin and his family, I took notice that a young girl just married carefully avoided looking at a particular man, for what reason I cannot divine, unless it was that the old man had been promised her first daughter. “ From enquiries which I made on the subject, I am induced to believe that a feeling of enmity does not permanently exist among the tribes, as it is terminated by a general battle royal, something after the style of an Irish fair. A short time previous to my departure a few men with their wives, from an adjoining tribe, came to that amongst whom I was living, with an invitation to join them in a conflict which they meditated with an adjoining tribe. They sent two or three young men to a tribe to the westward, inviting them also to join them on this occasion. I learnt that this hostile feeling had been created by a man having lost one of his eyes in a scuffle with a man belonging to the Western Port tribe. This accident happened about eight months previously, and although the party who now sought to avenge himself was the aggressor, having wounded his antagonist with a spear, he nevertheless determined on having satisfaction, and had succeeded in inducing his own tribe and that with which I was living, and probably would influence the other also, to whom an embassy of young men had been despatched to the westward, to espouse the cause of his odd eye. They also gave an invitation to the seven Sydney natives to join them with their guns. This of course I discouraged, and I was not without hopes that they might be induced through the influence of Buckley to forego their intention of taking their revenge, although from
