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Updated: June 27, 2025
At Moorunde, and among many other tribes, I have not found any numerical names to be given at birth, the first name usually being that derived from some object in nature.
Two other natives then went over to the Moorunde people, to where the three novices stood shaking and trembling, like criminals waiting for their punishment, seizing them by the legs and shoulders, and carefully lifting them from the ground, they carried each in turn, and laid them on their backs at full length upon green boughs, spread upon the ground in front of the three men sitting by the spears, so that the head of each rested on the lap of one of the three.
Another strong instance of the power that may be acquired over the natives occurred at Moorunde, in 1844: Several tribes were assembled in the neighbourhood, and were, as I was told, going to fight.
It was to remedy this melancholy state of affairs, that the Government station at Moorunde was established, and his Excellency the Governor, did me the honour to confide to my management the carrying out the objects proposed. The instructions I received, and the principles upon which I attempted to carry out those instructions, were exclusively those of conciliation and kindness.
"Sir, Feeling assured that the Governor would be anxious to hear from me as soon as possible after the receipt of my letters from Lake Victoria, I should have taken the earliest opportunity of forwarding despatches to his Excellency after I had ascertained whether the reports I had heard of the massacre of a party of overlanders at the lagoons on the Darling was founded in fact or not; but having been obliged to cross over from the ana-branch of the Darling to that river itself for water, and its unlooked-for course having taken me greatly to the eastward, I had no opportunity by which to send to Moorunde, although I was most anxious to allay any apprehensions my former letter might have raised as to the safety of my party.
When any new object is presented to the native, a name is given to it, from some fancied similarity to some object they already know, or from some peculiar quality or attribute it may possess; thus, rice is in the Moorunde dialect called "yeelilee" or "maggots," from an imagined resemblance between the two objects.
I can only account for this upon the supposition before given, that when large bodies of natives leave Moorunde for Adelaide, more men than women go away, and that consequently a larger proportion of females is left behind. Mr. Moor-house remarks, upon this point, that he has found the males to average seventy per cent more than the females, among the Adelaide tribes.
At Moorunde itself I have sometimes had from four to five hundred collected, and among those, only a few, perhaps, from the very remote tribes. At the Rufus and Lake Victoria, I have seen above six hundred together, where they had no other motive to collect in so large a party, than from custom, and for the enjoyment of festivity.
Now, at the Murray, among a large number of natives who, until 1842, were comparatively isolated from Europeans, and among whom are frequently many different tribes, I found by an accurate muster every month at Moorunde for a period of three years, that the women, on an average, were equally numerous with the men, from which I infer that such is usually the case in their original and natural state.
From being quite unacquainted with the language not only of the Darling natives, but also of the Rufus interpreter or the Moorunde boy, Captain Sturt's party had been only able to make out the story that was told to them by signs or by the aid of such few words of English as the boy might have learnt at Moorunde.
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