so far from black that the
red color was very apparent in her cheeks. She sat
before me in a corner of the group, nearly in the
attitude of Mr. Bailey's fine statue of Eve at the
fountain, and apparently equally unconscious that she
was naked. As I looked upon her for a moment, while
deeply regretting the fate of her mother, the chief,
who stood by, and whose hand had been more than once
laid upon my cap, as if to feel whether it were proof
against the blow of a waddy, begged me to accept of her
in exchange for a tomahawk!"

Eyre, another famous early traveller, writes on this topic (II.,
207-208):

"Occasionally, though rarely, I have met with females
in the bloom of youth, whose well-proportioned limbs
and symmetry of figure might have formed a model for
the sculptor's chisel. In personal appearance the
females are, except in early youth, very far inferior
to the men. When young, however, they are not
uninteresting. The jet black eyes, shaded by their long
dark lashes, and the delicate and scarcely formed
features of incipient womanhood give a soft and
pleasing expression to a countenance that might often
be called good-looking--occasionally pretty."

"Occasionally, though rarely," and then only for a few years, is an
Australian woman attractive from _our_ point of view. As a rule she is
very much the reverse--dirty, thin-limbed, course-featured, ungainly
in every way;[152] and Eyre tells us why this is so. The extremities
of the women, he says, are more attenuated than those of the men;
probably because "like most other savages, the Australian looks upon
his wife as a slave," makes her undergo great privations and do all
the hard work, such as bringing in wood and water, tending the
children, carrying all the movable property while on the march, _often
even her husband's weapons_:

"In wet weather she attends to all the outside work,
whilst her lord and master is snugly seated at the
fire. If there is a scarcity of food, she has to endure
the pangs of hunger, often, perhaps, in addition to
ill-treatment and abuse. No wonder, then, that the
females, and especially the younger ones (for it is
then they are exposed to the greatest hardships), are
not so fully or so roundly developed in person as the
men."

The rule that races admire those personal characteristi