The power of sorcery appears always to belong, in a degree, to the aged, but it is assumed often by the middle aged men.  It is no protection to the possessor, from attack, or injury, on the part of other natives.  On the contrary, the greater the skill of the sorcerer, and the more extensive his reputation, the more likely is he to be charged with offences he is unconscious of, and made to pay their penalty.  Sorcerers are not ubiquitous, but have the power of becoming invisible, and can transport themselves instantaneously to any place they please.  Women are never sorcerers.  It is a general belief among almost all the Aborigines, that Europeans, or white people, are resuscitated natives, who have changed their colour, and who are supposed to return to the same localities they had inhabited as black people.  The most puzzling point, however, with this theory, appears to be that they cannot make out how it is that the returned natives do not know their former friends or relatives.  I have myself often been asked, with seriousness and earnestness, who, among the Europeans, were their fathers, their mothers, and their other relatives, and how it is that the dead were so ignorant, or so forgetful, as not to know their friends when they again returned to the earth.

One old native informed me, that all blacks, when dead, go up to the clouds, where they have plenty to eat and drink; fish, birds, and game of all kinds, with weapons and implements to take them.  He then told me, that occasionally individuals had been up to the clouds, and had come back, but that such instances were very rare; his own mother, he said, had been one of the favoured few.  Some one from above had let down a rope, and hauled her up by it; she remained one night, and on her return, gave a description of what she had seen in a chaunt, or song, which he sung for me, but of the meaning of which I could make out nothing.

Chapter VI

NUMBERS—­DISEASES—­CAUSE OF LIMITED POPULATION—­CRIMES AGAINST EUROPEANS—­ AMONGST THEMSELVES—­TREATMENT OF EACH OTHER IN DISTRIBUTION OF FOOD, ETC.

There is scarcely any point connected with the subject of the Aborigines of New Holland, upon which it is more difficult to found an opinion, even approximating to the truth, than that of the aggregate population of the continent, or the average number of persons to be found in any given space.  Nor will this appear at all surprising, when the character and habits of the people are taken into consideration.  Destitute of any fixed place of residence, neither cultivating the soil, nor domesticating animals, they have no pursuits to confine them to any particular locality, or to cause them to congregate permanently in the same district.  On the contrary, all their habits have an opposite tendency.

The necessity of seeking daily their food as they require it, the fact of that food not being procurable for any great length of time together in the same place, and the circumstance that its quality, and abundance, or the facility of obtaining it, are contingent upon the season of the year, at which they may visit any particular district, have given to their mode of life, an unsettled and wandering character.