Squirting is Women's Business

"...... Time and experience must have been their teachers, according to our ideas; they believe that it was superhuman beings who first taught them `many things'; including what things to eat. Anyhow, they somehow learnt to exist...."   (p53)

"...... Half a dozen lively widgees were screeching to one another to get off their lazy behinds and hurry to catch up with the women already away on the hunt. A widgee, of course, is a lively young girl, barely a teenager....."   (p117)

"...... Riding through the long blady grass right up to a group of pandanus palm, we stared at four black figures up there, one coiled around each palm top, two older women and two young girls. With a screech the two old women came slithering down, followed by the widgees, whose frightened eyes were sticking out like pickled onions. As they sped away, Dick let out a "Hallo! Tally-ho! Tally-ho!" and, laughing, we galloped after them. The poor little widgees, terrified nearly out of their skins by the fearsome horses, let alone the terrible riders, threw themselves convulsively into a tangle of blady grass. At once the older women wheeled back and straddled themselves over the terrified girls.....

"As our snorting horses reined back, each skinny old girl in shrill indignation clutched a long breast in her hand and squirted up a stream of milk at us. Much surprised, I gaped down over my horse's head for to me it had been an absolutely unexpected form of attack. With screches and violent cries they shooed us away and then, more milk coming to the ready, each hand seized a breast, and up shot four streams of milk, one of which splashed fair in my indignant horse's eye. As he plunged aside Dick reined back, laughing fit to bust.....

"Dick shouted reassuringly to the women in those tribal languages he knew, then in pidgin. But they took not the slightest notice. The languages were not theirs, and they did not understand pidgin. There were pure myall, the wildest of the wild.

"Leaving their charges pressed flat to Mother Earth, the old girls bravely advanced upon these monsters, our horses, throwing out their skinny arms and work-worn claws at us exactly as if they were throwing a handful of dust upon us. As they came they stamped their skinny shanks and feet, throwing out their arms and hissing, keeping up a continuous 'Hissss! Hissss! Ssssh! Ssssh!' until they were nearly under our startled horses' necks. Then they seized their breasts again.

"....... we retreated a distance, then faced round again. At that they came for us again, waving us violently away with screeches and hisses.

"`Oh, stow it!' called Dick. `And the same to your aunt! We don't want your skinny widgees! Here, catch this!' and he threw them two sticks of Nigger Twist tobacco. I'm blessed if they didn't snatch the tobacco, then violently throw it straight back at us.

"That tears it - proves they're so wild they don't even know what tobacco is!" Dick laughed.

"You win!" he called to the still threatening lubras. "You win, girls! Hold your milk till we get out of range!" With a laugh and gallant wave of his tattered old hat, we rode away defeated......" (pp 118-119)

"The two older lubras we had been so surpriserd to meet, they who had guarded so bravely their terrified charges, were taking these two maidens on their last course of instruction into the mysteries of womanhood, her duties to totem and tribal laws, her duties to her man, her duties to her tribe, her duties to the Spirit Ancestors of the tribe. The girls would roam with only their guardians and instructors on their last hunt in maidenhood, absorbing their final lessons in womanhood before being `made into woman' before the tribe. By some deep law recognized by all tribes living under this same system of beliefs, these four, so long as they kept well away from sacred grounds, could roam where fancy took them and, so long as the guardians retained charge of the girls, were safe from all men..... when part-initiated girls are thus in charge of guardians in their last trip before final initiation into womanhood, then men pass them by with averted eyes.... The guardians with the girls seek to roam among the Women's Secret Places, away from all people, but should wandering hunters pass by them the women simply do not exist for them.

"It is some deep atavistic belief, the most difficult of the secret beliefs I think, to get to the bottom of; I never could do so. The greybeards would shake their heads, smilingly denying it. If pressed, they would mutter `It is women's business, not ours!' If pressed further they would become sullenly, dumbly angry. The most remarkable thing, to our way of thinking, is that if a raiding party of women-stealers happened to come on such a foursome, they would silently hurry by, `not seeing' them.......

"....This is one of the very few instances in which Stone Age woman has inaliable rights against man, some right which that lord of the forest and all he surveys dare not break. To attempt to do so, no matter how innocently, is such unexpected sacrilege that the lonely, defenceless Stone Age woman will most bravely and fanatically beat away even the dreaded, invincible white man."

"And I mean *bravely*, for, as we have seen, the wild Australian aboriginal regarded the mounted white man and his weapons with superstitious horror. Some, if not all the tribes thought when they first saw mounted white men and heard their `thunder-sticks' that they were spirit men flown down from the skies."(pp127-128)

[Ion Idriess "Our Stone Age Mystery" Angus & Robertson Sydney 1964.]

comments:

The first para is gratuitous, included because it supports perhaps my most weird of beliefs - the firm certainty that in the past and present spirits DO appear and provide humans with vital information about survival.

The women would have understood all messages - the chase, the intent behind the words, the value of the tobacco offered. But taboo was being broken and it would have been disasterous to have communicated or accepted the gift/bribe offered.

It is true that austro-melanesian men treat their women very badly. It is equally true that many white men have treated them even worse. And it seems that the offspring of these enounters are especially vulnerable to temporary "abudction" by small spirits of humanoid appearance.

Based on Idriess' evidence, "Woman's Business" is so sacred to the aborigines they may not even talk about it. The price of disregarding this taboo would be extreme bad fortune and the further disintigration of the now fragile social organization of the few survivors of the holocuast visited on this continent by white people.

Right now in Oz there is a Royal Commission sitting trying to find out, wouldja believe, more about Women's Business. This is in the wake of the "Hindmarsh Bridge Affair" when aboriginal women pleaded against a proposed bridge construction and development in one of their remaining special places. This had resulted in a drunken part-aboriginal man claiming on TV (for a price) that is was all bunkum - statements he has since apologetically retracted.

But the Royal Commission is still continuing. So be it in the scrub or in the city, be they randy young prospectors or pot-bellied urban degenerates, white people are still prepared to try to trample all over belief systems they do not comprehend.

As for spirit men from skies, half man and half animal, this theme crops up in many cultures. To the europeans, they were centaurs.

Most of the people of Cape York are gone now. Soon after the incidents described above (just after WWI ) the great flu epidemic struck and most of the native people died. Of the survivors, most developed serious afflictions of the nervous system c 1957-61 when a big British/South African corporation arrived and started exploiting the Cape's vast reserves of bauxite.....

Ah, but "genocide" is such a dirty word.

Lawrie Williams