Note 2 — Chapter III

This remarkable custom, by which the natives produce hypospadi artificially, belongs especially to the tribes west of the Diamantina river, and west and north of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and does not, as might be supposed, originate in lack of means of sustenance, since the districts in question are full of rats, fish, and such vegetables as nardu, pigweed, and the like. In a few tribes the children are operated on, only about five per cent being spared. In other tribes it is the husband who, after becoming the father of one or two children, must submit to the requirements of the law, as it is said, amid certain festivities (as for example trees are cut down and stuck into the ground in a circle around the place of operation). A man about twenty years old from Georgina river, whom I examined, explained to me that the reason for the operation was, that the blacks “did not like to hear children cry in the camp,” and that they do not care to have many children. This person had not been operated on himself, as he had not yet been the father of a child. According to the information I gathered, the cut, which is about an inch long, extends almost to the scrotum. The surface of the wound is first burnt with hot stones, whereupon the wound is kept apart by little sticks which are inserted, and in this manner an opening is formed, through which the sperma is emitted. The natives of these tribes are fat and in good physical condition. Mr. White, a squatter from Rocklands in North-western Queensland, and an excellent observer of the blacks, noticed for the first time in 1876 near Boulya that some of them had been injured in some way, and found that they had been operated on in the manner described. Later he saw a number of cases, and they all explained to him that the reason was that they did not care to be burdened with too many children. (See in regard to this custom also two articles by Baron N. von Miklucho-Maclay in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. Berlin, 1880 and 1882.)