Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/173

by touching which, its rotatory motion is accelerated; if it miss its object it comes back to the person by whom it was thrown. In the hands of these savages it is a very formidable weapon. Behind one of the lines of combatants stood a woman, a hideous creature, and rather old, whom I understood to be the teterrima causa belli; if so, the ravisher must have been one of those frantic lovers who see "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt." This dame seemed excited to the greatest pitch of fury; she held in her hand a stick about four feet long—one of those used for grubbing up murnongs—with this she struck the ground, at the same time bending her body with the most violent contortions, or else brandished it in the air with the wildest gestures, to give force to a torrent of eloquence, something between a chaunt and a harangue, which she screamed forth until she foamed at the mouth; her dishevelled hair streaming in the wind, her for cloak flying about with the violence of her motion, her thin, skinny arms tossed about with the wildest fury, her unearthly screaming and violent gesticulations, exciting the idea of a demoniac fury more than of anything human; indeed, she would have done admirably for one of the devils who appear in the last scene of Don Giovanni. I witnessed this scene for about three quarters of an hour, and was then forced to go on. Returning in the evening, I inquired the result from an old black friend of mine, named Jack Mungit, who told me that two men had been speared, one through the calf of the leg, and another through the thigh, and that a third had had his cheek cut open with a boomerang; he seemed rather ashamed of having been engaged in so