Destinations > Bzzzzzzzz - Slap!

After a night like that you'd have to wonder how the original Australians coped during the mosquito season. One type of shelter in Arnhem Land consisted of an elevated sleeping platform roofed with paperbark sheets and raised about 1.8 metres above a smoky fi re, which kept the mozzies away.

In 1911 the anthropologist and photographer Baldwin Spencer recorded the details of the manufacture and use of a traditional mosquito-proof shelter on the Roper River:
"It was fifteen feet long, between four and fi ve feet broad, and four feet high. The framework was rather like a boat turned upside down. At either end was a forked stick, and between these two ran a ridge-pole, occupying the position of an upturned keel. A series of ribs arched
over on either side... Sheets of paper-bark were very ingeniously laid on so as to form a wall impenetrable both to rain and mosquitoes." Through the "small opening... left at one end... the natives crawl until the hut can hold no more. The opening is closed, smoke fires are lighted, and here, almost hermetically sealed, they swelter and choke until the rain clears off or the morning light drives the mosquitoes away. If they cannot get bark their only hope is to make great smoke fires with green bushes and grass, but, in the real mosquito season, they have, at best,

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very uncomfortable and disturbed nights and have to make up for it by sleeping during the day."

On the face of it it seems that the cure must have been worse than the complaint. Even the poorest designed modern tent would have to be better than the traditional paperbark torture chambers of the Top End aborigines.

 

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