“GOING BUSH”

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3423, 22 February 1936, Page 2

“GOING BUSH”

YOUNG DOCTOR IN WILDS LIFE AMONG ABORIGINES Dr Donald- Thomson, young anthropologist of Melbourne University, has returned to civilisation after living for nine months—on the appointment of the Commonwealth Government amongst the wild tribes of the extreme North of Australia. “We have been inclined,” he said “to look upon them as debased hang-ers-on to white men, or at the best as backward children. We must understand that they have many traits that command respect. Theirs is the most complex social organisation in the world. They differ from the white races in kind rather than in quality. Theirs is a world of magic, depending on tradition reaching back to far ancestral times. The mystical and mythical form a background to their minds that makes them think and act differently from us.” A white man could live on the same food as the natives, said Dr Thomson,.so long as his teeth would stand up to it. His own teeth were badly knocked about by aboriginal fare, and he left several loosened fillings behind in Arnhem Land. He took with him as much European food as his few bearers could carry, but this was not much, and for a great part of the lime, he lived entirely on native foods. He found much of the dietary good eating. Fresh water tortoises cooked in native fashion were appetising. Water snakes were good. The cooked flesh looked like fish, but had no fishy flavour. Goanna was often on the menu. The thick base of the tail was eaten. It tasted rather like smoked haddock.

A big proportion of the native food was vegetable. Some plants eaten regularly by the aborigines were highly poisonous in their fresh state; but the ffbison was removed by a long and complicated process of cooking and blanching in fresh water. By far the best and the most valuable native food, of course, was “sugar-bag,” the wild honey. To keep up his supply of vitamins, he ate the livers of animals killed for the camps. The natives, amazed at his ability to stand long stages better than they—at one time he walked 150 miles over rough country in six days—attributed his endurance to liver. As a consequence, Dr Thomson left behind him a trail of raw liver eaters.