PUGNACIOUS FEMALES

Jealousy is capable of converting even civilized women into fiends; all the more these bush women, who have few opportunities for cultivating the gentler feminine qualities. Indeed, so masculine are these women that were it not for woman's natural inferiority in strength their tyrants might find it hard to subdue them. Bulmer says[172] that

"as a rule both husband and wife had fearful tempers; there was no bearing and forbearing. When they quarrelled it was a matter of the strongest conquering, for neither would give in."

Describing a native fight over some trifling cause Taplin says (71):

"Women were dancing about naked, casting dust in the air, hurling obscene language at their enemies, and encouraging their friends. It was a perfect tempest of rage."

Roth says of the Queensland natives that the women fight like men, with thick, heavy fighting poles, four feet long.

"One of the combatants, with her hands between her knees, supposing that only one stick is available, ducks her head slightly—almost in the position of a school-boy playing leap-frog, and waits for her adversary's blow, which she receives on the top of her head. The attitudes are now reversed, and the one just attacked is now the attacking party. Blow for blow is thus alternated until one of them gives in, which is generally the case after three or four hits. Great animal pluck is sometimes displayed…. Should a woman ever put up her hand or a stick, etc., to ward a blow, she would be regarded in the light of a coward" (141).

"At Genorminston, the women coming up to join a fray give a sort of war-whoop; they will jump up in the air, and as their feet, a little apart, touch the ground, they knock up the dust and sand with the fighting-pole, etc., held between their legs, very like one's early reminiscences in the picture-books of a witch riding a broom-stick."

"The ferocity of the women when excited exceeds that of the men," Grey informs us (II., 314); "they deal dreadful blows at one another," etc.

For some unexplained reason—possibly a vague sense of fair play which in time may lead to the beginnings of gallantry—there is one occasion, an initiation ceremonial, at which women are allowed to have their innings while the men are dancing. On this occasion, says Roth (176),

"each woman can exercise her right of punishing any man who may have ill-treated, abused, or hammered her, and for whom she may have waited months or perhaps years to chastise; for, as each pair appear around the corner at the entrance exposed to her view, the woman and any of her female friends may take a fighting-pole and belabor the particular culprit to their heart's content, the delinquent not being allowed to retaliate in any way whatsoever—the only occasion in the whole of her life when the woman can take the law into her own hands without fear or favor."