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Title:      The Passing of the Aborigines (1938)
            A Lifetime spent among the Natives of Australia
Author:     Daisy Bates, C.B.E. (1859?-1951)
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Language:   English
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Title:      The Passing of the Aborigines (1938)
            A Lifetime spent among the Natives of Australia
Author:     Daisy Bates, C.B.E. (1859?-1951)





With an Introduction by Arthur Mee

INTRODUCTION

On the fringe of the vast island continent of Australia live a few
millions of white people; in the vast desert regions far from the coast
live a few thousands of black people, the remnant of the first
inhabitants of Australia.

The race on the fringe of the continent has been there about a hundred
years, and stands for Civilization; the race in the interior has been
there no man knows how long, and stands for Barbarism. Between them a
woman has lived in a little white tent for more than twenty years,
watching over these people for the sake of the Flag, a woman alone, the
solitary spectator of a vanishing race. She is Daisy Bates, one of the
least known and one of the most romantic figures in the British Empire.

She has left these poor people whom she counts as her children and has
come back to civilization for a little while to write this story of her
life among the Aborigines on the rim of the great Nullarbor Plain. She
has given her life and her heart to this dying race, the first people of
our southern Dominion. She has done it for the love of humanity and for
England. She has neither sought fame nor found it. She has made no money
by her long life's work. Through all these years she has been alone, cut
off from the world, with only these strange, backward, hopeless people to
give her a little human society now and then. There is in her life
something of the spirit of service that moved Florence Nightingale, and
something of the spirit of sacrifice that filled the heart of Father
Damien. She would not put it so, for she has loved her life and made a
joy of her labour, but it is right that tribute should be paid to Mrs.
Daisy Bates.

She was the daughter of an Irish family, and came over to London in those
far-away days when journalism was a noble business and Fleet Street was
excited by the doings of a young man named Stead. Daisy Bates joined his
staff. She was a keen observer, a woman with scientific knowledge and a
gift for languages, and she began her working life in the glow of that
great spirit who stirred and entertained all London in his day. He lies
in the bed of the Atlantic with the ruins of the Titanic about him, while
the Irish lady on his staff sits in her tent on the banks of the Murray
River, looking back on those few years at the hub of the world and her
long years alone in the Australian wilderness.

She went out to her Aborigines in the first years of this century. She
found them decreasing in numbers with the coming of the white man, their
root-foods ploughed up, the tracks to their water-holes disappearing. She
wrote a history of them which still remains in manuscript. When the
century was ten years old she went out to two islands on a Commission to
study the hospital treatment of these poor people, and while there she
set up a post office so that the patients could communicate with their
families on the mainland. One of the first services she rendered to them
was to conduct a mail with notched sticks, conveying messages to their
friends. She had forty patients on her hands and pulled every one
through. She kept them tranquil and cheerful in their bush shelters, sat
by their sick beds listening to their tribal stories, joined with them in
praying to their totems when they wanted rain. They had never known
anyone like her. They named her Kabbarli, grandmother.

It happened that her husband died, and Mrs. Bates, left with a cattle
station and thousands of cattle, decided to dispose of her property and
to interest herself in these people. She decided that the only way to
help this dying race was to live with them, and she travelled wherever
she heard of natives gathering. She made herself known to all these
wandering tribes. Five times she pitched her camp along the edge of the
Plain which none of these Aborigines had dared to cross till Edward John
Eyre crossed it in 1840; and her fifth camp was in the sand-hills of
Ooldea, which she reached when the Great War was raging in Europe. There
she stayed, living a mile from the transcontinental railway in a tent and
a shed made of boughs, ringed round by a high breakwind. Here she passed
from her prime to old age, walking a mile every day when she was over
seventy years old to get water, and carry it back to her tent, where she
would spare it for the birds though the thermometer was 112.

Sitting at her tent she would receive these wandering tribes, little
regiments of them coming one day from nowhere to nowhere, another day in
search of revenge for some blow struck at them by another tribe ahead.
She would greet the little ragged processions (ragged or naked as the
case might be) as the one friend they had in the great world beyond their
reach. They would come to her with the confidence of a child in its
mother, yet like creatures from another world than ours. I shall never
forget her writing to me that a woman she had had for tea at her tent had
eaten her own child. Dramatic and terrible as such a thing is to us, it
was no new experience for Daisy Bates, for cannibalism has never died out
among these wandering tribes. They will kill and eat from revenge, or
from primeval motives beyond our understanding.

More than once the last member of one of these tribes has died in the
arms of Daisy Bates. "Where am I going?" asked one of these pathetic
dying people, and we may wonder if anything could be better than
Kabbarli's answer: "My Father is where you are going." All fear was gone.
"Your Father, Kabbarli? Then I shall be safe," and the poor tired Jeera
fell asleep, her warm hand growing cold as Kabbarli held it.

Between her mind and theirs was the gulf that only many generations can
bridge-she with a deep love of humanity, a mind filled with dreams, and
her heart stirred with a passion for England; they with the primeval
emotions of mankind, to whom the railway train puffing steam is the great
white snake, in whom the spirit of the cannibal is not yet dead. To her
the most pathetic memories of her life are the sights and sounds of
England, the primroses and the church bells, the green fields and the
song of birds, the wild rose in the hedgerow, the little church at the
end of a country lane, and the harvest field; but for a generation she
has not seen these things, and will not now. She has chosen, instead, to
be the last friend of the last remnant of this dying race. The last
friendly hand, the last kindly word, that will come to them will be hers.

She knows them as they know themselves. She knows their languages, their
rituals, their traditions, their capacities and their incapacities, as no
white man or woman on the earth knows them. She can talk to them in 188
dialects. They have invited her to ceremonies which their own women may
not attend, and have admitted her into their tribes and put their sacred
totems in her keeping. She is a magical figure to them. She can quell a
squabble with a word or a look. They come to her hungry and she feeds
them. They come to her naked and she clothes them. They come to her sick
and she heals them. She belongs to no church, no mission, no creed; she
has been a woman alone befriending these poor people, ruling them not by
law but by the simple directness of character, the power of a personality
which has no room for selfishness and seeks no end but the happiness of
others.

If we ask what it is that she has had in view through all these years it
is the thought that England, with these people in the shelter of the
Flag, owes something to them. Their race is bound to disappear-it is
about 60,000 strong and does not grow like the proud Maori race of New
Zealand. It has been her idea that their lives should be controlled and
cared for with that fact in view. They should be left as free as
possible, to pass from existence as happily as may be. She has wanted to
save them from the worst effects of casual contact with the fringe of
civilization. In their way they are pure and simple folk, and she has
come to love them. She has a strong belief in British administration, and
has always wanted a King's Man to look after these people.

It is for this end that she has lived the life of a heroic woman,
labouring in solitude in a climate often parching and only rarely
bursting into beauty, seeking to succour a noisome race, melancholy in
outlook and terrible in habits. For a little while she has left them. She
left them for three enchanting weeks in 1933 when the Government invited
her to Canberra to discuss the Aborigines. A surprising figure she must
have been in the streets of the capital, this white-haired old lady from
the uncivilized world, wearing the shirt blouse, the high collar and the
long skirt of the early years of our century. For her there are no
changing fashions. For a little while, again, she returned to
civilization to set down this story, and, tiring of city streets, she has
set up her tent once more on the banks of the great Murray River where
years ago these people made their home. She has found their old haunts
deserted, with not a native left.

Perhaps she may return to them; perhaps not; but still she dreams that
the Empire will not fail this human renmant in its keeping. Still she is
buoyed up by the belief that a man, the right man, a King's Man, will
some day be appointed by Australia to take charge of these children of a
race which inhabited Australia before the white man heard of it, and are
dying out not knowing how wonderful life is.

To us she is Daisy Bates, Commander of the Order of the British Empire,
the most remarkable woman in Australia. To them she is the magical
Kabbarli, whose word is love and law, and whose life is swayed by the
spirit of the Master whom she serves.

ARTHUR MEE.



Prologue

A VANISHED PEOPLE

Perth from King's Park. I can never look down on the panorama of that
young and lovely city from the natural parkland on the crest of Mount
Eliza that is its crowning glory without a vision of the past, the dim
and timeless past when a sylvan people wandered its woods untrammelled,
with no care or thought for yesterday or to-morrow, or of a world other
than their own. Scarcely a hundred years have passed since that symmetry
of streets and suburbs was a pathless bushland, a tangle of trees and
scrub and swamp with the broad blue ribbon of river running through it,
widening from a thread of silver at the foot of the ranges to the estuary
marshes and the sea.

Through it all, a kangaroo skin slung carelessly over his shoulders, a
few spears in his hand, strode the first landlord, catching fish in the
river-shallows, spearing the emu and the kangaroo, and finding the roots
and fruits that were his daily bread. His women and children meekly
followed, carrying his spare weapons, their own household gods, and
perhaps a baby swung in the kangaroo-skin bag. Every spring and gully,
every quaintly distorted tree, every patch of red ochre or white
pipe-clay was his landmark, and every point, hill, valley, slope or flat
from the river's source to its mouth had its name. Simple in his needs in
a land of plenty, knowing none other than the age-old laws of life, and
mating, and death, that have been his through the unreasoning centuries,
he was a barbarian, but his lot was happy. As far as humans can, he lived
in perfect amity with his fellows.

For hundreds of miles about him the people of the country were all his
kindred, and the campfires dotting the river-flats, and the ranges, and
the sea-coasts, and the great timber-forests were fires of friendliness.

As I dream, the red glow of those fires of fancy grows hard and cold and
yellow, regular as the street-lights of a city, and the ranges beyond
them are lost in the shadow-even as the last of their people. Of the
songs that rang to the stars in the far-off time there is no echo. The
black man survived the coming of the white for little more than one
lifetime. When Captain Stirling landed on the coast in 1829, he computed
the aboriginal population of what he had marked out as the metropolitan
area at 1,500 natives. In 1907 we buried Joobaitch, last of the Perth
tribe.

Chapter I

MEETING WITH THE ABORIGINES

As I dream over the orphaned land of the Bibbulmum, [See Chapter VII.]
my thoughts fly back, too, to the events which brought me on a second
visit to Australia after a period of journalism in London with W.T.
Stead, on the Review of Reviews, back to the stone-age nomads whom I had
but glimpsed on my first visit to Australia, but among whom the rest of
my life was to be cast. It was in 1899 that circumstances made possible
my return to Australia.

Just before I left London a letter had been published in The Times
containing strong allegations of cruelty to Western Australian aborigines
by the white settlers of the North-West. I called upon The Times, stated
that I was going to Western Australia and offered to make full
investigation of the charges, and to write them the results. The offer
was accepted.

While friends were bidding me farewell, one of them espied a kindly old
Roman Catholic padre on deck, and asked him to "keep an eye" on me on the
voyage out. The priest was an Italian named Martelli, and on the deck the
first evening we embarked on a delightful friendship that lasted till his
death. I studied Italian under his tutelage, until one day I mentioned
the subject of the Australian natives, and showed Dean Martelli the
letter in The Times. Italian grammars were promptly put aside as I gained
my first knowledge of the remnants of a fading race, and the problem they
afforded the Government and the missions in the Western State. I learned
also of the Beagle Bay Mission, away in the wilds of the North-West,
where the Trappist fathers had come from their beautiful old home
monasteries among the vineyards of Sept Fons in France in rigours and
difficulties to minister to the aborigines in the vicinity of Broome.

Shortly after I landed in Perth, I obtained a buggy and horses and
camp-gear, and journeyed by sea to Port Hedland. Arrived at that remote
port, I stayed at a licensed shanty with earthen floors and blue
blankets, where the hermit crabs from the seashore nibbled my feet every
time I put them to the floor. I then traversed in my buggy eight hundred
miles of country, taking six months to accomplish it. I could not prove
one charge of cruelty, except that of "giving offal to natives instead of
good meat," and "sending them away from the stations without food when
work was slack." So far as these were concerned, I found that the
favourite parts of any animal, large or small, were the entrails, which
were torn out of the beast and eaten half raw. Later, on my own station,
I discovered that the blacks insisted on a "pink-hi" or walkabout
season-they could not live without it-and that they would not carry flour
and tea, preferring their own bush tucker. Once in my inexperience, I
myself packed up a plenitude of provisions for them, tied neatly in
bundles on their heads, with new shirts and trousers and medicines and
other conveniences I thought they might need. A few days after they had
gone, riding to an outlying windmill, I came across a snow-storm of the
flour that they had playfully thrown at each other. The tea and sugar had
been consumed at this first well, and the trousers and sundries were
deposited in a tree-fork.

Care-free and unclad, gathering their native foods and bending to drink
at the soaks and water-holes, the natives had taken a hundred-mile trail
to anywhere, to call on their friends and relations, where they could
play and quarrel till the desire for damper and tea saw them homing to
the station again. So much for the allegations that awakened my interest
in the Australian aborigines, and which were the beginning of my life's
work among them. The Times published the result of my investigations and
the matter dropped for a decade.

It was while I rested at Sherlock River Station, near Roebourne, in 1900,
that I gained my first knowledge of the natives' social organization, and
the classes into which they were divided, and was myself entered into one
of these classes. The white people of the station, the well-known
pioneering families of Withnells and Meares, were West Australians, and
father, mother and children had all been classed by the natives according
to their aboriginal relationships. I was so much interested in the
systems of these primitive people that I inquired if I also had been
classified.

"Oh yes," Mrs. Meares told me. "You belong to my husband's class, and you
are his sister and my sister-in-law, the paternal aunt of my children."

Before I left Sherlock River, I had discovered the fundamental simplicity
of the system. Later, at Beagle Bay, I found myself entered in exactly
the same class division. This was enlightening and good news to me, and I
utilized it later among the Broome groups, with excellent results.

It suffices to say that in every native group throughout all Western
Australia, and passing from group to group in South and Central
Australia, I assumed as a matter of course my proper relationship. Even
when I went to my camp in the desert at Ooldea, I found the natives there
in touch with those of the west a thousand miles away across the border,
and the western class divisions remembered.

On my return to Perth, Dean Martelli invited me to the Bishop's Palace to
meet Bishop Gibney, Roman Catholic Bishop of the State of Western
Australia. Bishop Gibney and the Dean were about to pay a visit to Beagle
Bay. I was invited to go with them and see this Mission for myself, and
to tell of its benefits, or otherwise, to the natives. I was told that
the fate of the Mission hung on the report of the government valuator,
who would make a patrol almost immediately to see if the scheduled
improvements that would entitle the Mission authorities to a fee-simple
over 10,000 acres had been carried out. These improvements must total
£5,000, otherwise the grazing lease must be forfeited. I accepted with
alacrity, and made my preparations, with stores of clothing, food and
sweets for distribution.

In July, the two priests and I were under way for the port of Broome,
from which we were to tranship to Beagle Bay. At Broome the Sree pas
Sair, at one time the yacht of Rajah Brooke, was placed at our disposal.
It had been stripped of every comfort. Cleanliness there was none, as it
was the "feeding-lugger" of the pearling-boats owned by a Manila-man, and
brought back the shell from the luggers. After an interesting voyage
round the fleets in the Sree pas Sair, we returned to Broome, and with
three of the Trappists waiting there, loaded up the yacht. I learned that
not only was there no accommodation for a woman at the monastery, with
all its rigid poverty and simplicity, but, according to Trappist
principles, no woman except a queen could be allowed within its walls.
However, there I was, and the dear little acting abbot took it upon
himself to grant a dispensation, and went out to see what furniture he
could buy for me, making wild guesses at what a female might need. His
bewildered and exaggerated idea of hospitality filled me with
astonishment.

We all worked hard at the loading and packing of the lugger, and in the
beginning of August the Sree pas Sair set out northward. There were eight
of us on board-the Bishop, the Dean, the acting abbot, two brothers,
Xavier and Sebastian, the owner and helmsman, his Malay uncle and a small
Malay child. We reached Beagle Bay on the high tide that rises thirty
feet in a few hours, and the whaleboats took us, and eventually the
stores, to land. Just near the beach was a primitive turtle-soup factory
and in the fenced-in enclosure an unfortunate turtle awaited
transformation into eighty tins of soup. We inspected the factory, but
were not impressed by the dirty native women and girls loafing about it,
so we did not accept the turtle soup.

Mounting from the ship's deck on horseback, we set out, the Bishop and I,
across the nine miles of bleak flat that lay between the beach and the
Mission, Dean Martelli and the brothers following with the bullock-team
which had been sent in for the stores. I rode side-saddle on a
stride-saddle-a painful ordeal. A few half-clad natives straggled along
behind us. As we jogged on through the heat and flies and blankness, the
Bishop intoned the rosary, and the natives joined in when they knew the
words. The horses were Trappists, too, skin and bone in their poverty.
They stopped so often for their meditations and devotions that the
bullock-team arrived before us.

At last in the early moonlight we pulled in to a few tin buildings in a
clearing. About 150 natives, men, women and children, shouted a welcome
to us from the shadows. None of us had eaten anything to speak of for
three days on the Sree pas Sair, and the lay brother had set about
unloading the stores and preparing a meal.

Beagle Bay had been founded by Bishop Gibney ten years before when, with
two little exiles of Spanish priests, he had taken a long pilgrimage
through the bush from Derby, at last finding suitable country with ten
precious acres of wonderful springs, natural wells and extensive swamps,
the best water in the North-West. He had secured a lease, under certain
conditions, of 10,000 acres, and the native reserve which extended for
600,000 acres about it. The Trappists there established the first Mission
in the far North-West. Unable to speak English and quite unused to
Australian conditions, the two little pioneer priests and the sixteen
ordained men who had followed them from the old French monastery had
endured years of unbelievable hardship in a remote wilderness. Some had
died there, under the saddest conditions. Others, blind and emaciated,
had been rescued from their fate and invalided home.

When I arrived, the Mission was but a collection of tumbledown,
paper-bark monastery cells, a little bark chapel and a community room of
corrugated iron, which had been repeatedly destroyed in bush fires and
hurricanes. There were four monks left on the station. They were Abbot
Nicholas, a Catalonian Spaniard, father confessor, doctor, teacher and
overseer; Brother Sebastian, a Mailaman who was the cook; Brother Xavier,
a Broome constable who had laid down his baton for the rosary-beads on
the Bishop's first visit, and was gardener, store-keeper and handyman,
and Frere Jean, stockman.

Frere Jean had been dedicated to the service of God at Sept Fons in his
early childhood. I was the first white woman, other than his mother, he
had seen or looked at in his life. As I came into the community room,
which had been set aside for our living-place, eager for my supper, Frere
Jean fled from the world, the flesh and the devil that I represented, but
before I left Beagle Bay he had so far overcome his religious horror of
me that he made and fitted me with a neat little pair of kangaroo-skin
shoes, and even slept trustfully in my company when we all camped out on
our survey expedition.

The Trappists led a life of rigorous poverty, intensified in this barren
remote land to the point of starvation. There were cattle on the station,
but meat was excluded for religious reasons, and the monks existed on one
meal a day of pumpkin and rice, and a little beer they had made from
sorghum grown in the garden. Rising at 2 a.m. they kept vigil in the dark
chapel till dawn, then worked till daylight's end, speaking no word save
in necessity, and closing the day with some hours on their knees on the
bare earth. I was the first white woman to appear among them at the
Mission, and the first that the natives of the region had seen.

From the newly arrived stores, Brother Sebastian had provided a strange
and varied meal for us according to his lights, extraordinary stews and
puddings served in any order and all strongly flavoured with garlic;
milkless tea in a huge jug that was both teapot and cups for us all. Poor
Brother Sebastian may have been a paragon of piety, but he was no cook.
In my keeping to-day is a fragment of petrified bread roll he made for
me in 1900! It has been mistaken for a geological specimen, and, always
carried with me in loving memory, it has survived, without losing a
crumb, thousands of miles of rough transport.

Perhaps the first woman in history to sleep in a Trappist bed, I was
allotted the abbot's bag bed and seaweed pillow, and the sawn-off log for
my chair or table. I woke to hear the natives singing a Gregorian chant
in the little chapel near by. Half clothed and, for all the untiring work
of the missioners, still but half-civilized, they comprised the
Nyool-nyool tribe, of the totem of a local species of snake. Most of the
women and men had their two front teeth knocked out, and some still wore
bones through their noses. Infant cannibalism was practised, where it
could not be prevented-as it still is among all circumcised groups. One
of the old men, Bully-bulluma, having been an epic meat-hunter in his
day, had eight wives. Another, Goodowel, was dressed in trousers and
shirt, one stocking, his face painted red with white stripes from each
corner of his mouth in broad lines. A red band was round his head, the
hair drawn back to form a tight knob, and stuck in the knob was a tuft of
white cockatoo feathers and a small wooden emblem. I know now that he was
in the sixth degree of initiation.

Although they had tried their hardest, with prayer and precept, to teach
these natives cleanliness and Christian living, giving their very lives
to the work in torture and privation, those Spanish priests could hope
for little headway in the first generation. There was one terrible
manifestation of savagery that I can never forget.

A man had been found dying of spear-wounds out in the bush, and carried
to the Mission as he was breathing his last. I watched two of the lay
brothers bearing the stretcher to one of the huts, a horde of natives
following. I noticed that they held their burden curiously high in the
air. Suddenly, as it was lowered for entry to a doorway, the natives
crowding round, to my horror, fell upon the body of the dying man, and
put their lips to his in a brutal eagerness to inhale the last breath.
They believed that in so doing they were absorbing his strength and
virtue, and his very vital spark, and all the warnings of the "white
father" would not keep them from it. The man was of course dead when we
extricated him, and it was a ghastly sight to see the lucky "breath
catcher" scoop in his cheeks as he swallowed the "spirit breath" that
gave him double hunting power.

Chapter II
IN A TRAPPIST MONASTERY

I was awakened by the sound of the conch shell which did duty for a
monastery bell in that primitive spot, and when I went out into the open
I was surrounded by all the women and children, a bright, pleasant little
crowd, but oh! how dirty! Although the monks for some years had issued
the dictum "No bath, no breakfast," the natives preferred the lesser of
two evils, and went hungry until the ban was lifted. Shack dormitories
had been erected for the unmarried girls and men, but most of the natives
came in from the camps in the bush where they slept under the trees.
Their beds were hollows scooped in the sand where a fire had been
burning, the sand and the stones sometimes so hot that they left raw
wounds in the flesh. Father Nicholas told us that they ate dirt in
handfuls, and that the women sometimes ate their new-born babies, but
that since the advent of the Mission, with its admonitions and its daily
distribution of pumpkin and rice and tea and flour, cannibalism was not
nearly so much in evidence.

Immediately after our monastic breakfast of coffee and Brother
Sebastian's rolls, we started off to inspect the Mission property and set
it shipshape for the valuator's visit. A survey of the whole lease was to
follow. Although I had come up merely as a "child taking notes," I
started on the very practical manual labour necessary to improve the
appearance of the place, sharing the toil with the brothers and the
blacks, and the Bishop in his shirt-sleeves. The four months that I spent
there were nothing but the sheerest hard work under the most trying
conditions.

Manual labour has been the keynote of all my work for the aborigines. I
have never made servants or attendants of them. I have waited upon the
sick and the old, and carried their burdens, fed the blind and the
babies, sewed for the women and buried the dead-only in the quiet hours
gleaning, gathering, learning, always hastening, as one by one the tribes
dwindled out of existence, knowing how soon it would be too late.

At Beagle Bay, the Spanish priests and monks had performed almost
incredible labours in their ten years' isolation, but there was little to
show for it. Willie-willies and fires and tropic conditions had taken
constant toll. When houses and crops and gardens were burnt, they had to
start all over again. When their horses were lost, or died from eating
poisonous weed, they harnessed themselves to the carts and logs, yet the
conditions of the Mission seemed hopeless. The bark huts were
dilapidated, the gardens smothered in growth of saplings and suckers, and
some of the wells had fallen in.

I was sent in charge of some native women to do some "scrubbing"-that is,
hoeing up the small shoots, or saplings, of uprooted trees, and to open
up the fallen wells, of which the flooring was as shaky as an Irish bog.
I worked like a Trojan, but the force of my example failed dismally. Day
after day those women played with the babies, and laughed both with and
at me, full of merriment and good feeling. Now and again, a few of them
took up the spade or the hoe in a stirring of conscience, but not for
long, and all my efforts to make it an interesting game failed to produce
results. I tried to gather the babies and children and play with them,
and let their mothers do a little manual labour, and I started
"Ring-a-ring-a-roses." No sooner had we go into the swing of the game
than every woman and girl "downed tools" to join in. I compromised. We
adults must work, and when the rest time came at hot midday or evening,
we would have games. The little plan worked, and so we worked and played
merrily throughout. As I worked they talked to me, and told me a little
of their laws. Curiously enough, they had entered both the Bishop and me,
believing him my brother, into one of their four-class divisions, the
abbot and the monks belonging to another. The women quite frankly
admitted to me that they had killed and eaten some of their children-they
liked "baby meat."

There was a fight, apparently to the death, between two of these women
one day, one of them heavily pregnant and the other an aged creature,
nothing but skin and bone. It was the old story, an eternal triangle.
Some time before, a boy had come down from Sunday Island, and being of
good conduct and a fair worker, had been duly married to one of the
unallotted girls of the station, which was what he had come down for. All
went happily until, with another batch of visitors from the northern
land, there arrived an old lady with prior claims, and maledictions and a
yam-stick to prove them. The women fought steadily, blow for blow
alternately, each blow well-timed and aimed for the direct centre of the
skull. As each one took her turn the other passively submitted. At length
the younger woman fell unconscious, and the fight was over.

When these purely personal quarrels took place, the Trappist found it
best to let them run their course, so that there would be no subsequent
ill-feeling. In this case the old woman lovingly attended the other, and
stayed with her peacefully in the camp until she returned home, minus the
husband, but quite satisfied. This was another "law" universal throughout
the groups. Twins were born to the young woman shortly after, and the
Trappists named them Matthew and Daisy, in honour of the Bishop and
myself-a doubtful compliment, but appreciated.

So far as the safety of the missioners was concerned, there had never
been any trouble at Beagle Bay, but at every layingup season, when the
pearling ships were off-shore, practically every boy who had a woman took
her down to trade her with the Asiatics. These women returned dying and
diseased, after the boats had resumed pearling. It was an iniquitous
thing, but it could not be prevented. Some boats laid up at Beagle Bay
during our stay, and to keep the women and girls away from them, the
Bishop told Father Nicholas to lock them in the store for the night.
There was only one small opening high up in the wall, fifteen or twenty
feet above ground and no ladder. Even so, at daybreak when we went to the
store there was not a woman there. They had piled up the store cases and
climbed to the little window, dropping without hurt on the soft sand. The
Bishop hurried down to the seashore to reclaim the girls, and ordered the
coloured men away. Next night the blacks and their women joined them at
another anchorage.

The association of the Australian native with the Asiatic is definitely
evil. There were four Manilamen at Beagle Bay married to native women. By
tribal custom the women had all been betrothed in infancy to their
rightful tribal husbands. They were therefore merely on hire by their own
men to the Asiatics, and, in spite of the church marriage, remained, not
only their husband's property, but that of all his brothers, and all of
the Manila husband's brothers who paid for the accommodation. It was hard
to convince the Bishop and the little abbot of this fact and of the
terrible cruelty to the women and girls of such a system, and I had to
show the two priests a poignant example. I had visited the Manila
quarters in Broome, and in one house found a poor aboriginal woman, the
"wife" of a Manilaman, with five of his "brothers" waiting to have and
pay for intercourse with her. The poor soul told me that this happened
daily. A few days afterwards I took the two priests to this hovel,
choosing the Manila rest hour of the day for our inspection. I knew the
terrible shock this would be to the little abbot and the Bishop to
realize what Manila-Aborlginal marriage meant for the native woman: but
with these facts the Bishop gave his direct veto on the dreadful system
and in future such marriages were prohibited.

For three months, and more, we had worked on the reclamation of the
place, and the valuator arrived just as we had cleared the last corner.
He was surprised to see a thriving property where he had expected ruin
and decay. Every screw and post, every fruit and vegetable, buildings,
wells, trenches and implements were meticulously valued, and with the
livestock on the run, the supplies in the store, the sorghum and
sugar-cane fields, the tomato and cucumber patches, and the orange,
banana and coco-nut and pomegranate groves, the sum reached over £6,000.
Even one Cape gooseberry bush and one grape-vine had to be valued. The
Mission was saved for the natives. All together and in much jubilation we
made the first bricks of sand and loam and clay for the new convent and
monastery, of which I laid the foundation brick.

I had then, and have now in retrospect, the greatest admiration for the
Trappist missionaries, and nothing I may say about the sometimes
incongruous results of their self-sacrificial work implies any inability
to understand its sacred purpose. Although I am an Anglican, I attended
all religious ceremonies, morning and evening, during my stay, and loved
to listen to the natives, with their sweet voices, intoning the Latin
chants and responses as much as I loved to listen to their own weird
music. There were innumerable baptisms and weddings. On one occasion a
little wisp of a girl about 12 years old was married to a man old enough
to be her grandfather, who had always been lucky in the allotment of
wives. He was a good hunter, and the unborn babies were betrothed to him
to excite his generosity. If they happened to be boys they became his
brothers-in-law. I spoke to the child-bride, Angelique, intending to
rescue her from unwilling bondage, but she told me that she "likim that
old man all right."

The wearing of a wreath and veil at religious ceremonies is an old
Spanish custom, and the Trappist fathers kept wreath and veil in stock.
All of the newly baptized and the brides wore it in turn, a delightfully
ludicrous touch it seemed to me, worn above wild hair and matted beards,
and no respectable clothing to speak of.

Knowing that he would probably never pay another visit to the Mission,
the Bishop announced his intention of making confirmed Christians of all
the natives in the district, and I shall never forget the occasion. Dean
Martelli and the brothers rounded up the mob. Crowded into that little
bark chapel, and smelling to high heaven, sixty-five wild men and women
and babies of the Nyool-nyool stood before a prelate of the Roman Church,
in all his ceremonial robes of lace and purple and mitre, to be anointed
with the holy oils and receive the papal blessing and the little blow on
the cheek of the "Pax tecum." Some of the men wore nothing but a vest or
a red handkerchief, some a rag of a shirt, and the fraction of a pair of
trousers. They had been told to keep their hands piously joined together,
and their eyes shut-and the flies were bad.

Standing behind them, close to the door for a breath of air, I tried in
vain to maintain a solemn countenance and a reverent mien, only to
explode at least once in choking laughter at the antics of one boy.
Knowing that I was behind him, he was at the same time desperately trying
to keep his hands clasped in prayer, and a rag of decency well pulled
down over his rear elevation. A frown of disapproval from under the
dazzling mitre and an impatient jerk of the sacred crook m my direction
sobered me up, but that afternoon, hearing a succession of loud shrieks
of laughter from the camp, I went along to see how the newly-confirmed
Christians were progressing.

Imagine my mingled horror and delight to find Goodowel, one of the
corroboree comedians, sitting on a tree-trunk with a red-ochred billy-can
on his head, and a tattered and filthy old rug around his shoulders. In
front of him pranced every member of the tribe, all in a line, and each
wearing a wreath and veil that were a bit of twisted paperbark and a
fragment of somebody's discarded shirt. As they passed Goodowell each
received a sounding smack under the ear with a shout of "Bag take um!"
Hilarious and ear-piercing shrieks of laughter followed each sally. I
went back in glee to tell the Bishop. He shook his head. "Ah, the poor
craytures!" was all he said.

There was yet another ordeal before us, a never-ending ordeal it seemed.
In a few days' time, we set out again, with the natives and the
bullock-dray, to survey the whole leasehold of 10,000 acres. Our only
surveying instruments were the compass of an old lugger and a chain. The
Bishop and I were the chairmen, and we walked in a steamy heat, of 106
degrees at times, sometimes twelve miles in the day. Over marsh and
through the pindan, now lame from the stones and prickles, now up to our
thighs in bog, we plodded on, the Bishop in the lead, throwing down a
small peg to mark the chain limit, the brothers and the blacks and I
behind him. I was always in difficulties owing to my small stride and
high-heeled footwear, and many a time, seeing me perched perilously on
the edge of a bog, the Bishop would give a mischievous twitch to his end
of the chain, and land me deep in it.

We were all always hungry. Brother Xavier, in charge of the commissariat,
was very good so far as he went, but he never seemed to come as far as we
did, and we were always faint from lack of food. In the simplest meal-and
they were all simple meals, of bread and beef-he would forget the salt,
or the bread or the meat, or the place where he had arranged to meet us,
or that we existed at all, but in hunger and hardship we managed to keep
our good humour throughout our whole long stay, strange companions in the
solitude of the bush.

On the night-walkings, rosaries were chanted all the way home, the
natives and brothers responding. I often stumbled and fell in the dark,
but that rosary never stopped. Sometimes we washed our faces in water
from a bottle-tree. Felix, the native guide, chose his tree, chopped at a
spot with his tomahawk, left the axe sticking in the cut, and the water
came out clean and sparkling like a miniature waterfall. One morning,
just before dawn, we came to Argomand Water-a glorious pool of still
silver, where there was a sudden whirr of myriad wings to greet us, and
thousands of birds of brilliant plumage rose in a cloud, screaming. That
was the happiest circumstance of the long and arduous circuit. I compiled
all the survey notes at night. Those survey notes were later a source of
great amusement to the Bishop and his staff, but the Bishop received the
title-deeds of his ten thousand acres, so the mud-stains and blots
scarcely mattered. Later, in Perth, he presented me with an inscribed
gold watch, in memory of our survey work, and the saving of the mission
for the natives.

The valuation was satisfactory, and the valuator departed. Travelling
with the bullock-dray our next journey was to Disaster Bay, twenty-five
miles north, to bring the consolations of religion to those not yet
converted. The Bishop and I rode ahead, with two native women, the
bullock team, Father Nicholas and the boys bringing up the rear.

It was a two-days' journey, and on the first we out-distanced the
bullock-dray, camped in a good spot, and hobbled out the horses. Hour
after hour we waited in the moonlight, but no dray appeared. At length we
made back on foot to meet it. We found it three miles behind, all its
party settled down for the night and fast asleep. The bullocks refused to
move on after that day of blazing heat. Coffee and damper improved our
spirits, and then we too settled down.

In the morning, Father Nicholas made some coffee of the last little
supply of water left on the wagon, and we were on our way before the sun
was up. It rose hot and fiery. There was no more water, and no water-hole
until we reached disaster Bay. We had been able to find neither drum,
keg, nor water-bag at the mission. We tried to hurry, but our horses were
bad-tempered and thirsty. Now and again we dismounted to let the black
women ride. Lake Flora we found to be a hard, dry claypan, which would
not yield to spade or shovel. We went on as quickly as we could, the
black women leading, the Bishop keeping them in sight, and I vainly
trying to keep the Bishop in sight.

That night again found us far from our haven, as we had been zigzagging
to try and find water. The Bishop suffered greatly from thirst, but he
was a good bushman, and plucking a gum-leaf held it between his teeth to
stimulate the saliva. At length one of the women cried "Ngooroo!"-fire or
camp-and in a few minutes we were beside the water. Everybody rushed to
the open well. It was sweet magnesium water, but they drank and drank,
insatiable. I wisely waited for the boiling of the billy and the making
of tea. During the night, or what was left of it, the whole party was
convulsed with sickness and pain, and I produced my flask of brandy, that
I have always carried throughout my travels, to accord each of them,
Bishop and monks, a little relief.

I camped in the hut that the previous missioners had erected at Disaster
Bay, and the others camped outside it in the moonlight. I had scarcely
snatched an hour of sleep in one of the four dust-bag bunks that hung to
the walls when I was rudely awakened by the presence of thirty naked
women, of all sizes, giggling at me. From the neighbouring camps the
natives had been rounded up by one of the Beagle Bay boys for the
Bishop's visit. Being quite unsophisticated they were as much amused by
my appearance as I at theirs. I have always preserved a scrupulous
neatness, and all the little trappings and accoutrements of my own very
particular mode of dress, sometimes under difficulties, but I think I
never made a more laughable toilet than that one. Every motion of mine,
as I laced my corsets and eased my shoes on with a shoe-horn, brushed my
hair and adjusted my high collar and waist-belt, was greeted with
long-drawn squeals of laughter and mirrored in action, though the slim
black daughters of Eve about me had not even a strand of hair string
between the whole thirty.

We could not spend more than a few days at this outpost, and next morning
my Lord the Bishop baptized and confirmed every man, woman and child that
could be gathered in, including babies in arms. Father Nicholas dutifully
had brought along the wreath and veil, and there it was, the only article
of wearing apparel in evidence. Vividly I can see again the spectacle of
a hairy savage with a bone through his nose, a wreath and veil, and
nothing else whatever.

Food was given to the natives from the bullock-dray, also the rest of the
clothing I had brought for them from Perth, but they had in mind the tail
of a "'gator" they had seen in a nearby creek, so, eager for my first
sight of a crocodile, while the priests were attending to their plans and
duties, I rambled away with them. Wading barefooted in the shallow waters
of the mangrove flats, now deeply embedded in the grey mud, now scratched
by the shells and suckers, my feet immediately swelled with some swift
poison, until I could fit them into nothing smaller than two sugar-bags.
There was little pain but much inconvenience as, with my poor nether
limbs like hills in front of me, I endured the carriage in the dray back
to the Mission at Beagle Bay.


The valuator with Dean Martelli, an aged man worn out with his exertions,
had made overland with the only horse vehicle, to Broome, but the ship
was again waiting for us. So the Bishop and I, and the four natives
carrying our luggage, set out to walk the nine miles to the Bay, anxious
to catch the tide as the ship's captain, Roderiguez, was eager to be off.
After a last meal of grimly abstemious Trappist fare, we bade farewell to
the heroic little brothers, and began our journey at 2 p.m. on a day of
century heat in November. We talked as we walked, of the work done and
the joy of its successful accomplishment. But presently the Bishop, who
had never lagged before, showed signs of collapse. He laid his hand, and
then his increasing weight, upon my shoulder, and so we crept on.

The journey would ordinarily have taken three hours, but we had only
reached the five-mile well when darkness came. The Bishop showed signs of
slight delirium, calling me "Margaret," the name of a beloved sister in
Ireland. It must have been ten o'clock when the natives whispered to me
that we were at the beach, where he sank down unconscious. We
straightened his weary body, the natives and I, with part of my rug-strap
under his head. There we camped, unable to see the ship offshore, and I
quite ignorant of our surroundings. The only sound I heard was the tide
sucking at the mangroves. To make matters worse, the natives came, in
frightened whispers, to tell me that "big pindana (inland) mob
blackfellows come up" close by, strangers from the inland bush. I said
"Don't be afraid. Eebala (father) and I will take care of you." Then I
placed two of them lying one at each side of the Bishop, and I lay down
with my head on the rug-strap and my feet in the opposite direction, the
other two natives on either side of me.

The Bishop slept in utter exhaustion, and I not a wink. Stamping of feet
and wild cries came to us clearly. Now and again a black form between me
and the stars told me that our natives were listening, and in terror they
would whisper to me of these bad pindana-womba who sometimes hang about
the outskirts of the Mission to steal their women and to fight. I changed
the subject to the stars and the sky, and they told me of the dark place
in the Milky Way which was once a native road to the sky country, until
one day some women on the way lighted a fire and burned the road, which
was really a sacred wooden emblem. Our heads were together as we
whispered, the Bishop's white unconscious face beside us. Then a fiercer
chant and the mound-beating of the pindana men would send us all
noiselessly on our backs again. Through the false dawn we were
particularly watchful, but nothing happened.

Broad daylight brought a boat from the Sree pas Sair, four months dirtier
than when we boarded it at Broome in August. The Bishop was laid on deck.
Only Manilamen were on board, and I sat near the Bishop through the
hundred-mile journey. An uncle of the Manila owner there was, a naked
cheerful old man, who sang one tune the whole way down. That lilting
little tune always brings the scene vividly to my mind-the filthy boat
that was once a miniature floating palace, the sleeping Bishop lying on a
sail-cloth, and the Manila helmsman looking up at a sort of calico
cornucopia which, when filled with the winds, was his steering compass.

Just before we entered Broome waters the Bishop opened his eyes and
looking round wearily, saw the old Manilaman lying naked and unashamed
nearby.

"Go and put your clothes on!" he called to the poor old fellow, who had
neither clothes nor need of them in his rough life on the sea.

A typically Irish ending to a difficult work accomplished.

Chapter III

SOJOURN IN THE DREAMTIME

So far, my association with the natives had been cursory, and purely
practical. I had caught nothing but a few stray glimpses, and those
through other eyes, of the strange hidden life of this last remnant of
palaeolithic man. The next eight months were spent among the
Koolarrabulloo tribes of Broome, and it was there that my feat attempts
at systematic study of aboriginal beliefs and customs were rewarded with
the most unexpected results, results which I have never made public,
until now.

Broome was a quaint and prosperous pearling port in the 1900's with a
polygot population living out on the ships and along the
foreshore-Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Manilamen, and a score of European
races. I believe there was actually an Eskimo among them. The hotels were
full of pearldealers from overseas, divers, shell-openers and traders,
white and coloured, and night-time was a continuous revelry. At one
period, so fast and furious was the racket that I was locked in my room
from danger of unpleasantness.

Even in those days the tribes of the place were but a remnant. My
interest in the town natives was confined to those in gaol. They were
chained to each other by the neck, and there was discussion as to the
humanity of this procedure. The natives themselves told me that it gave
them more freedom than handcuffs, and that a piece of cloth wrapped round
the collar relieved the weight and the heat of the iron, and left their
hands free to play cards and deal with the flies and mosquitoes.

From Broome, I took up my residence at Roebuck Plains, the property of
Messrs. Streeter and Male, an outlying cattle-station. There was a
comfortable homestead with good outbuildings. A housekeeper simplified my
domestic problems, so that my time was free. Aju, the Japanese cook, was
the only disturbing circumstance. He was an excellent cook, but was not
normal, and developed the habit of running amok at unexpected moments.
Sometimes, as I sat reading in the garden, his grinning gargoyle of a
face would appear out of the foliage, or upside down from the roof of a
nearby shed, and following my sudden start of fright, "Missie like a
cuppa tea?" he would inquire pleasantly, or "Lunch I been make him
quick-time now, you come?"

The black house-women were efficient enough in their lazy way, trailing
about the garden and their domestic duties in the bright dresses I made
for them, but try as I would, watching them with an eagle eye, I could
instil no morality into them so far as Aju was concerned. Within his own
tribal laws, the aboriginal is bound hand and foot by tradition; beyond
them, he knows no ethics. My only recourse was to frighten Aju with the
threat of instant dismissal if any of the girls were found at night near
his quarters.

Riding and roaming in the pindan, always accompanied by the boys and
women of the station, and any nomad visitors that came along, I would
camp out sometimes for days, sharing my food, nursing the babies,
gathering vegetable food with the women, and making friends with the old
men. Thus I extended and verified my knowledge by gradual degrees until I
gained a unique insight into the whole northern aboriginal social system,
and its life-story from babyhood to age. Every moment of my spare time
was given to this self-imposed and fascinating study. Not a word nor a
gesture passed me by without opening up an avenue of inquiry, tactfully
and methodically pursued.

I realized that the Australian native was not so much deliberately
secretive as inarticulate. He looked upon his "black life" as a life
apart from his association with the whites, few of whom had shown any
interest in it. I also realized that to glean anything of value, I must
think with his mentality and talk in his language. By the wells and the
creeks, sitting in the camps in the firelight, on horse-back and on foot,
my notebook and pencil were always with me. I began by compiling a Broome
dictionary, of several dialects and 2,000 words and sentences, with notes
of innumerable legends and myths.

The natives I found at first amused, and then stimulated to further
confidence by my obviously eager and sustained interest. I pretended that
my native name was Kallower, and that I was a mirruroo-jandu, or magic
woman who had been one of the twenty-two wives of Leeberr, a patriarchal
or "dreamtime" father. After that, the way was clear. They accepted me as
a kindred spirit, and with the utmost patience elucidated the seeming
tangle of relationships and class-groups, the marriage laws, the tribal
tabus, the traditional songs and dances. They even allowed me free access
to the sacred places and the sacred ceremonies of the initiations of men,
which their own women must never see under penalty of death.

The abstruse "matronymics" and "patronymics" of native marriage laws as
expounded in the hieroglyphics of the anthropologists, through which I
have vainly floundered many times before and since with no clear
conception of their exact meaning, the natives could simplify for
me-definition of the four group classes, and the cross-cousin marriage of
paternal aunts' children to the maternal uncles' children, the only
lawful marriage between the groups.

[In Broome district, these were Pooroongoo, male, fair, and Pannunga,
dark; Karrimarra, male, fair, and Parrajer, dark. Pooroongoo man marries
Pannunga, and their children are Karrimarra. Pannunga man marries
Pooroongoo, and their children are Parrajer; Karrimarra man marries
Parrajer, and their children are Pooroongoo; Parrajer man marries
Karrimarra and their children are Pannunga, and so on throughout all
generations.]

I have found these four groups and relationships, under
different names, identical in every tribe in Western Australia, east,
north, south and south-west among the great Bibbulmun people of the white
cockatoo and crow moieties. Aboriginal genealogies go no further back
than grandmother, and the cycle is thus limited to three generations.

I have always been placed in the same class-group, corresponding with
that of Pooroongoo, my place in the family being among the father's
sisters, but from this period, right through my thirty-five years of
joumeying, and including the twenty years in Central Australia, I was
believed to be not so much a woman as an age-old spirit of Yamminga
(Broome district term), the dreamtime, and keeper of all the totems.

Once I had grasped their relationships the lives of the natives soon
became easier to understand, and the poetry of their ceremonies and
legends and rituals an enchanting study. At the men's hidden corroborees,
far from my own people in the heart of the bush, because I showed no
quiver of timidity, or of revulsion of feeling, or of levity, because I
was thinking with my "black man's mind," I have never been a stranger.

Sitting in a neighbouring creek-bed, or boiling the billy by an old tank
out on the plain, the men would gather round me, taking infinite pains to
tutor me in the rippling inflexions and the difficult double vowels of
their language-a series of vocal gymnastics quite impossible to the
average white linguist, and which, I am perfectly sure, in all my years
of juggling with them, have altered the formation of my larynx. They
explained in detail the purpose of all their weapons and implements, why
the boomerang and the shield and the spear-thrower were curved or hooked
just so; they let me watch their making and the chipping of stone tools,
and told me the half-legendary stories of their origin. Dances and songs
were explained to me at symbolic and play-corroborees, and so we
progressed naturally from the world of actuality to the dream world. At
last, with the utmost simplicity and frankness the old men disclosed to
me little by little their most secret rites and initiations, without fear
of ridicule or objection, just as they disclosed the mythologies and
allegories of the mind of the primeval black man as mystical in their
beauty as the sagas of the old Norse gods.

Unique in Australia, I believe, and perhaps unique in the world, is the
legend of the dream-child, ngargalulla, as told me by the Broome tribes,
comparable only with Maeterlinck's delightful fantasy, The Kingdom of the
Futture, and its parallel in many respects.

Whereas the general aboriginal belief is that children are dreamed by the
mother, made pregnant by a spirit baby from the rocks and springs and
other traditional haunts of the baby spirits of birth and re-birth, among
the Koolarrabulloo it was the father who dreamed the child that was to be
born to him. They believed that below the surface of the ground, and at
the bottom of the sea, was a country called Jimbin, home of the spirit
babies of the unborn, and the young of all the totems. In Jimbin there
was never a shadow of trouble or strife or toil, or death, only the happy
laughter of the little people at play. Sometimes these spirit babies were
to be seen by the jalngangooroo-the witch-doctors-in the dancing spray
and sunlight of the beaches, under the guardianship of old Koolibal, the
mother-turtle, or tumbling and somersaulting in the blue waters with
Pajjalburra, the porpoise.

When the time came for a ngargalulla to be a human baby, it appeared not
to its mother, but to its father. Perhaps a Karrimarra man had fished and
eaten his catch, and settled in the shade to sleep. Then would the
ngargalulla baby appear to him, with all the signs of its own ground and
its own totem, calling upon him in the name of eebala, father. That might
it entered the body of his wife. The ngargalulla is seen only by the men,
and only by those men, I learned, who possess a "ranji," a subconscious
spiritual gift, a spirit, or mind as far as I could make out,
corresponding to a soul. The woman is sometimes told that her husband has
dreamed the ngargalulla. She does not know until she is conscious of it
within her.

The ngargalulla has its booroo, or ground, which is always beneath the
surface of its father's ground, but it is not a reincarnation of any who
may be buried in that ground, or of any dead ancestor, even of those who
went into the ground in Yamminga, the dreamtime. Their disappearance is
marked by some unusual feature, red cliff, stone emblem, etc. The live
totems go back to the sea and the land of Jimbin when their season is
over, but the spirits of the human dead are carried away to the island of
Loomurn, which lies over the western sea. The man is so familiar with
every feature of creek and rock and tree in his country that he can
immediately locate the ground of his dream, and no matter where the baby
is born, that dreamed ground is its ngargalulla country. Its individual
totems are those ngargalulla totems which appeared with it, its inherited
totems are those of its father.

So firm was the belief in the ngargalulla that no man who had not seen it
in his sleeping hours would claim the paternity of a child born to him.
In one case that came under my observation, a man who had been absent for
nearly five years in Perth proudly acknowledged a child born in his
absence, because he had seen the ngargalulla, and in another, though
husband and wife had been separated not a day, the man refused absolutely
to admit paternity. He had not dreamed the ngargalulla. Should a boy
arrive when a girl came in the dream, or should the ngargalulla not have
appeared to its rightful father, the mother must find the man who has
dreamed it correctly, and he is ever after deemed to be the father of
that child.

The ngargalulla is still a spirit in the first months of its existence,
but when it begins to laugh and cry, to touch and talk, and to manifest
its personality as a little human being, its links with the dream world
is gone, and it becomes coba-jeera-in other words, a normal baby.
Thenceforward, through its whole life, the fathers who have dreamed its
existence are the controllers of its destinies, within the relentless
circle of tribal law. There is no glorification of maternity, no
reverence of woman as woman in the dark mind of the aboriginal. Apart
from the natural affection between mother and son, sister and brother,
and apart from her physical fulfilment of certain dominant needs, a woman
is less than the dust. Her inferiority is recognized by the very youngest
of the tribe. Many a time I have seen a toddler throw sand in his
mother's eyes, and jeer at her and injure her, should she attempt to
control him. The secrets of life, the laws of life, are in the hands of
men.

As soon as I began living among the natives I came up against those weird
rituals of the initiations of the Australian aborigine, unchanged through
thousands of years, the novitiate of youth to manhood-a sacrament of sex,
a communion of blood, and a Black Mass of witchcraft and savagery, yet
instinct with a pure poetry of symbolism that goes back to the blind
beginnings of all religions, and throbs with the beating pulse of the
primeval.

Each successive initiation marks a vital stage in a man's development,
and the rites connected therewith are age-old and uncanny. No white man
has ever seen them as I have seen them, because I have attended them
day-long and night-long, camped sometimes for weeks alone with the
natives in the bush, through the whole western half of Australia, among
the circumcised and the uncircumcised, and through the centre of South
Australia, where the old marriage laws have totally declined in the
passing centuries.

So important are these initiation rites towards an understanding of life
and belief in those primitive lands and for appreciation of what follows
that some account of them is essential.

Chapter IV

THE BEGINNING OF INITIATION

The tribes of Australia may roughly be classed as circumcised and
uncircumcised. So far as their origin is concerned, that, too, belongs to
the dreamtime. I am doubtful that it will ever be established, except in
theory. I do not regard them as a race apart, but as a mixture, a nomad
people picking up scraps of racial character in their different
environments, and at last, in primitive Australia, gravitating to the
primitive life that they have led here for centuries.

I can follow only a boomerang clue of these wanderings, a geographical
curve back to Egypt, cradle of the human race-from Thebes, where the
boomerang is to be found in mural paintings and carvings, to Kattywar in
India, on to Celebes, and a step across to Australia. In the very heart
of this continent, and among the Bibbulmun of the South-West, I have
traced the Kas, Egyptian spirit of the newly dead, and the Central
Australian aboriginal cry of mourning, a word identical in meaning and
pronunciation, the graves that ever face the rising sun, and the Serpent
Cult of all groups.

Certain it is that all tribes came from northward, and that the
uncircumcised were the first hordes, later driven down south, east or
west by the encroachment of the circumcised. So rapid was this
encroachment of recent years that the whole of black Australia would have
been circumcised. Thirty years ago the practice embraced the north and
centre of Western Australia, save for a narrow irregular line from
Balla-Balla to Geraldton, skirting the sea, and thence a line cutting off
the south-west in a triangle to Cape Arid, on the rim of the Great
Australian Bight. Even with my own later experience, some of these
outlying tribes were drawn in, in the course of a few years, by
inter-marriage and association.

The tribes of Broome were, therefore, among the circumcised, and still
are, unless contaminated by Asiatic influences and by the influx of the
whites, as I believe they have been. In the sequence of the ceremonies
here described, I adhere rigidly to their practices and use the words of
their language, but the initiations are similar, throughout the
circumcised groups of Western Australia and the Centre.

The aborigine serves his apprenticeship to manhood from early childhood
to old age, and the degrees through which he must pass before he is
entitled to marry occupy many years. We left the newly-arrived
ngargalulla on the threshold of its babyhood sleeping in the bush shelter
of his own father and mother, playing with other camp-babies, never
smacked and rarely scolded, with a rotund little stomach so visibly
swelling in girth that, to a white man's inexperienced eye, it flouts the
possibility of digestion. However, a few years of quick growth solve the
problem, and at the age of about eight years or so comes the first step
in the march of manhood, the separation of the sexes.

As nimma-nimma, the boy then joins the camp of the younger men, bachelors
all, in various stages of initiation, their quarters being generally in
front of the married men's huts, and a little to leeward. There follows
what is probably the happiest period in the boy's life. He goes out with
his young companions, honey-seeking and hunting for small game. Toy
spears and boomerangs and shields are made for him, and he is taught
their manufacture and their use. He learns to dance in the
play-corroborees and begins to sense the significance of the totems; in
short, he goes to school. His elder brothers in a tribal sense are his
monitors, his guardians being father and his father's brothers and his
grandfathers. From the outset, an older-man known as the yagoo is
appointed to his especial charge. The yagoo is usually a brother-in-law
to be, a man to whom the tribal elders have betrothed one of his sisters,
who may still be an infant, or as yet unborn. He will be playfully
decorated, each decoration being explained to him in a childish way easy
of understanding.

When the time comes for him to enter upon the first definite stage of
initiation, usually when he is eleven or twelve years old, plans and
preparations are made. The women are sent far afield to collect
quantities of vegetable food while the old men inspect the sacred
ceremonial and totem boards, in their place of hiding, the
beegardainngooroo, or beega. This is usually a bush-shelter, rock-hole or
large shady hollow tree. Should women or children intrude upon this
secret place, either intentionally or unintentionally, they are
immediately killed. Should they unknowningly walk beneath the shade of
its tree, it is believed that they will lose the use of their limbs. The
sacred boards must never be disclosed to the eyes of women. I know of one
instance, on a north-west station, where a white girl visitor came into
possession of these boards, presented to her as a curio by a white man
who had found them. One afternoon she carelessly exhibited them to some
friends in the presence of three of the natives, two women and a little
girl. All three were dead by the end of the week. If the boards should be
eaten by white ants, or damaged beyond repair, they are burnt or buried
and new ones made.

The second stage of initiation is nimma-mu, the nose piercing. The yagoo
takes the boy apart, fashions a string of opossum fur and places it about
his waist, then sits him in a cleared space some distance from the camp,
with meat, fish and vegetable food piled beside him. The men sit round in
a circle while the yagoo puts one of the smaller bones from the forepaw
of a kangaroo through the septum, leaving it there through the night.
Foods are then shared. Next morning a turkey bone replaces the kangaroo
bone. Strict avoidance of all women and girls begins from this period.
Nimma-mu extends for some months, from autumn to spring. At the beginning
of the summer wet season, secret preparations are made for the fourth and
one of the most vital stages of initiation-balleli, the circumcision
itself.

The yagoo anoints the boy's body all over with charcoal and grease,
places a band of opossum string on his head, and the boy becomes balgai.
This is the third stage. Amongst the Beagle Bay people, the two upper
front teeth are knocked out at this time, but this is not often done by
the Koolarrabullbo of Broome. Early in the afternoon, the boy (now
balgai) starts on a journey, accompanied by his yagoo and other
guardians, to collect relatives and friends within a certain radius to
assist at initiation. They travel in one direction only, north, south, or
east, at the rate of about ten miles a day, and may cover 130 miles or so
in the full Journey. If there are two or three balgai boys, each one
travels in a different direction. Among the primitive people with no
mathematics, there is a very ingenious method of regulating days and
distances by means of the finger-joints, the right hand for the outward
journey, the left for the return.

The boy is a great favourite wherever he, goes, and as he approaches a
camp is greeted from afar, with shouts of "Balgai! Balgai!" There is
singing and dancing to celebrate his arrival. On the return journey each
camp sends its representatives to the coming ceremony, with gifts of
vegetables and meat food, until, nearing home, the gathering swells to a
very large one, heavily burdened with food and presents in anticipation
of the feast.

The balgai is now placed in charge of those who are to take the chief
part in his circumcision ceremonial, the waiung-arree, chosen from among
his principal relatives in all surrounding camps, with perhaps a
newly-selected yagoo. Escorted balgais from every direction approach the
appointed spot. The assembled party makes a halt some distance from the
home-camp to decorate. Here the balgai is ceremonially painted by his
vagoo with fat, charcoal, and an insignia red ochre on forehead, cheeks
and chest.

At last the great day dawns. A wallang-arree, or double circle, is
cleared some distance from the boy's camp. Among the visitors are usually
a number of young men in later stages of apprenticeship, who have come to
undergo certain other initiations. Every man taking part in these is
distinguished from the balgai group by having his legs covered with
blood. No youth is ever allowed to be present at an initiation higher
than that he himself has reached. The balgai have no blood sprinkled upon
them, nor have any of the group in charge of them, their decorations
being red ochre, white pipeclay, charcoal and dark yellow ochre.

The afternoon is the time of the balgai's expected arrival in camp. No
sooner is the sun below the meridian than the fathers take their place in
the centre of the wallang-arree, and with their boomerangs raised in
welcome await the visitors. As the first group approaches, there is a
ringing shout of "Aie! Kaie! Kaie! R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!"

The balgai is brought to the circle. The yagoo takes hold of the boy's
hands from behind, and shows him first to his father's uncles, and then
to his female relatives, who may look upon him only from a distance, and
through a veil of their hair. The boy is then held aloft and shown to all
his people assembled, while those standing within the circle sing the
following song with their faces turned to the northeast:

Waiung-arree ngow, waiung-arree ngow,
jandoo ngarrie ngaice
Waiung-arree ngow!

This song continues while the waiung-arree leader takes his men round the
inner circle.

All of the waiung-arree dancers are fully armed with spear and
spear-thrower. They wear the insignia of their various stages of
initiation, and faces and bodies are painted in highly original and
symbolic design that lend them an aspect fiendish and fantastic. Entering
from the right, they make a circuit of the wallang-arree and depart from
the left, taking the balgai with them and leaving room for the others,
the groups of the various balgai at last forming coils without
intermingling. Then all groups join together and arrange themselves in
several broken concentric circles, each alternate group rotating in a
different direction-a maze of painted black bodies that stamp and wheel
and swing to a strident accompaniment of loud shrill singing. The women
keep their own circle on the outskirts, and must never come near enough
to touch the men.

When the dance is ended, a double row of men lies flat on the ground with
their heads in opposite directions. Another double row lies on top of
them and another, and another, until they become a human stack several
feet high which, with the balgai seated aloft in the centre, begins to
rock and sway from side to side. At a given signal, the men spring to
their feet, and the balgai falls gently in the midst of them.

Each row, catching hands, swings again into the wallang-arree alternate
rows going in opposite directions, the boys and the old men always in the
centre. This ceremony is called moorooboyn, and is accompanied throughout
by a spirited high chanting and a stamping of feet. At the close of it,
the boy is taken out of the circle for a brief respite, then brought back
into it on the shoulders of his yagoo. As soon as he reaches the centre,
he throws himself backwards into the arms of his mothers' brothers, and,
clasping his hands behind his head and stiffening his legs, is thrown
into the air again and again by four or five men. The yagoo takes charge
of the balgai and all adjourn for supper.

At this time all licence is allowed, and the laws relating to persons who
at other times are forbidden to look at each other are suspended.
Mothers-in-law may even approach or address their sons-in-law, and at the
supper, the thaloo, as the mother-in-law is called, makes the best of it.
A whole year of grievances is stored up, and the son-in-law has no right
of reply. She can touch him, taunt him, pull away his weapons and
decorations, and make him a public mockery. Her delight is to worry and
annoy, and he must keep a poker face through it all, unaware, as it were,
of her presence.

Now she tempts him with a hollow scoop of vegetable food--"You hungry?
Here is food. If you don't take it, I will hit you. All right, watch me
eat it!"--and she snatches it away. She tears off his arm-band, head-band
and other ornaments, and knocks his boomerang out of his grasp. As
provider for the family, he pays the price of his betrothal in meat food,
and she has much to say about this. "This meat no good!" she tells him,"
why don't you bring up a tadpole?" or, "Watch me, everybody, I'm going
to kill a fish," and she snatches his spear and aims it dangerously near
him. The wallang-arree is the crowded hour of glorious life for the
mother-in-law, and the whole tribe, with the exception of the son-in-law,
enjoys her sallies to the full.

In the early dawn, the men rise from their camps and go again to the
circle. If the mothers-in-law are awake, they throw insults after
injuries as their sons-in-law go by. The older men sit in the centre of
the circle and sing. When the sun is high overhead, the balgai is placed
a little apart. A spear is stuck into the ground in front of him and the
men return to the circle. The women now approach the boy with weeping. He
holds the spear with both hands, and looks upon his mothers and sisters,
but he may not speak to them. A mute farewell, and they are hurried away.

The yagoo appears, a fearsome figure, painted with jet-black charcoal
with stripes of yellow ochre down the front of face and body, red ochre
across forehead, nose and chin, feathers on arms and head, and hair
hanging loose below the hair-belt. He takes the boy to the forbidden
ground. The waiung-arree men approach, and again form a circle. The yagoo
presses the boy close to his breast for a moment, then turns him with his
back facing him, and holds him in a vice-like grip. An older
brother-in-law, with a small stone knife, swiftly performs the operation
of circumcision. The flow of blood is stopped with warm ashes.

The boy, who is now balleli, is seated on the ground. A small fire may be
lighted close between his thighs, supposedly to lessen the pain and dry
the flow of blood. His yagoo immediately takes off the head-ring and
other balgai decorations, replacing them with a flat forehead band and a
chignon made of human hair or opossum fur-string, a belt, and a tassel,
or perhaps two or three attached to it. Fresh red ochre is put across his
forehead, nose and cheeks, and then his fathers, uncles, and brothers pay
him a visit of congratulation. His true father brings to him a little
vegetable food, that has been specially prepared by his mother. The
ceremony is over, and the whole camp settles down to a feast, with
usually a fight or two to follow, the avenging of grievances new or old,
rarely with fatal effects. Later the visitors return to their own
country.

The balleli, if there is only one, remains apart, his brothers feeding
him and attending to him. He may walk about, but not within the sight of
the women. If there is more than one, the seclusion is not so trying. The
period is fixed by the older men. When it is over, the boy's own mother,
his father's sisters, and his own elder sister, make a bark bed near the
camp, upon which he is placed. His closest female relatives may not touch
him but they place vegetable food on the bark bed. The boy now takes his
place among the young men, sharing their quarrels and joining in their
evening songs, but he is kept entirely apart from the women, as are all
of the other young men who have passed through various higher
initiations. Should any woman, wilfully or accidentally, follow their
tracks at that time, she is killed. One child, Nganga-gooroo, thus
followed a boy, who threw his spear and killed her. The tracks were
carefully examined by the old men, who, finding that the boy had not
allowed the girl to approach, exonerated him and praised him. It is the
law.

While they are in the bush, the youths subsist on flesh food only, and
their faces and bodies are coloured with charcoal, so that any woman-may
see them from afar and know that they are "forbidden." A fire is lighted,
upon which thick green boughs are placed, causing a thick smoke and the
young men, arming themselves with hunting weapons go by relays into the
middle of the smoke, to smoke the magic of the ceremonies from their
bodies and restore their strength. Weapons are frequently smoked to
ensure success in hunting, and make their aim true. In my many years
among the blacks, I myself have been smoked by my thoughtful friends more
than once. During this process the smoke song is repeated till the last
man has trodden it, and the smoke dies away.

When the morning star rises, they sing the Morning Star song, and the
song of the Kingfisher, which belongs to young initiates only.

A little later, a meeting is appointed with the old men, in the cleared
space at the foot of a big gooneroo, a species of gum tree. When all are
arrived, the boys climb the tree, using no native tomahawks but only
their hands and toes, and swing on the branches. Then a man in an
advanced stage of initiation-maam-boongana-sits close to the foot of the
tree with his legs at either side of the trunk. An old man comes close
and hits the tree with a club, whereupon the young men slide down one by
one and fall into the lap of the maam-boongana man, making a pile of
human bodies. The old man cries, "Aie! Aie!" and the maam-boongana slides
from under the heap, the rest separating in the same manner.

This little ceremony, it was disclosed to me, harks back in its turn to
the dream-time, when men were birds and when birds were men. The songs
sung throughout the stages emphasize this dreamtime belief.

Chapter V
THE END OF INITIATION, THE BLOOD-DRINKING

As the young men [During this stage they are called weerganju] come in to
camp from the tree ceremony they are received by a capering jester,
called mami ngarring wombanoo, who sings as they approach:

Balnga, marrinday, balnga, marrinday,
Lingoorambaa, lingooraa.

When they hear the jester's song, they pretend to be greatly frightened,
and shouting "Wo! Wo! Wo!" surge into a close-packed crowd.

Then the clown, bedizened with pipeclay and red ochre, comes closer and
repeats his song, dancing about them. All sit down and partake of meat
food, and there is dancing and singing by the old men's fires throughout
the night, the Morning Star and Kingfisher's songs being sung
alternately. The balleli are separated from the weerganju during the more
advanced ceremonies that follow.

The old men obtain some of the inner bark of the woordoola, or
paper-bark, and this is doubled into about six inches in width, and
fastened at each end with opossum fur string, forming a wide belt called
after the woordoola. This belt the older men tie round the weerganju's
waists. Logs are placed end to end by the old men, with bushes laid upon
them. All the weerganju lie down with their heads resting on the logs,
then the older, fully-initiated men, each of whom will be guardian to a
younger man, tie their lower arms, and, piercing the vein, hold the arm
over the young man until both the bark and his face and body are covered
with blood. The blood dries quickly and blackens the woordoola. The
guardian flicks away the dried blood from the boy's eyelids, nose and
chin, puts a little red ochre on his breast, and a headband round his
forehead. Over the woordoola three belts are placed, the upper and lower
being of opossum string, light in colour, and the middle belt of black
human hair. Attached to the lower are two or more pubic tassels of
opossum fur.

The belief are now brought forward, and dressed by their yagoo with
string-belts, hair-belts and tassels, with red ochre across their faces.
All journey towards the women's camps, where bark beds have been made
ready in a long row. The weerganju sit on the bark beds and are cried
over by their female relations. No woman must ever touch a weerganju over
whom the blood has been poured, else she win die, or the young man will
die, or the part touched will wither and become useless. Next day the
belts of string and hair are placed in charge of father's sisters or
mother's brothers' wives. The woordoola is worn until the old men see
that it is getting broken, when it is buried by one of the fathers, or by
its wearer. When this is done, the balleli puts his belt aside and wears
only the forehead band, chignon and the tassel which hangs by a single
string.

Balleli lasts a year or so, and the next stage of initiation is
jamung-ungur, the blood-drinking. This ceremony is called walla-wallong.
When the fathers think it is time for the balleli to become jamung-ungur,
a message is sent to camps to collect all those whose presence is
desired. When these are assembled, the yagoo calls the boy aside, and
tells him "Moogula baaloo!" (Put your string on!) At sundown, the balleli
approaches the men's camp, and someone shouts to him "Wamba Jeeoo!" (Man
coming for you, run!) He runs, but must quickly allow himself to be
caught or his mother will die. He is then taken to the secret place.

In the evening, the men come and take their places according to tribal
precedence. Uncles and brothers seated in the inner circle, and the boy
in the centre, lying with his head on his own father's thighs. Presently
the blood-relations, younger fathers and older brothers, come within the
circle. Standing over the boy, with one leg on either side of them, they
begin a step dance, lifting their feet quickly in time to the joorrga
song, sung by the men in the circle. Two men may dance above him at one
time, and then others take their places until all the blood-relations
have danced above him.

This is the eve of the blood-drinking, and while the men sleep a yagoo
keeps night-long vigil with the boy. In the morning, all gather at the
secret place. The boy again lies with his head on his father's thigh. He
must make no movement, or he will die. The father blindfolds the boy with
his hands, as if he should witness the following proceedings it is
believed that his father and mother will both die.

A wooden vessel or a bark vessel is placed near one of the boy's mother's
brothers, who, having tied his arm tightly, pierces the upper part with a
nose-bone and holds the arm over the vessel until a certain amount of
blood has been taken. Then the man next to him pierces his arm, and so
on, until the vessel is filled. It may hold two quarts or so.

The vessel is brought to where the boy is lying. The father takes his
hands from the boy's eyes, though they remain closed while the rude bark
chalice is lifted to his lips. The boy then takes a long draught of the
blood. Should his stomach rebel, the father holds his throat to prevent
his ejecting it, as if that happened his father, mother, sisters and
brothers would all die. The remainder of the blood is thrown over him.

From this time the boy is allowed no other food than human blood,
Yamminga, the mythical ancestors, having made this law. After the
blood-drinking, he is left either by himself or in charge of a yagoo, and
the others go back to the camp to eat. In the afternoon, they return and
the boy again lies with his head on his father's thighs and closes his
eyes, and the men take the pieces of opossum string which they have used
as ligatures, holding them taut between their hands. The father cries to
the boy to open his eyes and look upon the string. While he is silently
looking, the men chant the blood song, one single monotonous note of
pulsing rhythm:

Warrboo jool-jool baa naa!
Warrboo jool-jool baa naa!

Each man ties his own arm again with the string, pierces the swollen vein
with the nose-bone, and fills the vessel for a second blood drinking.
When the boy has taken a certain quantity, old men and younger men drink
also, and the remainder is thrown over the boy. Sometimes the blood is
dried in the vessel, and then the yagoo cuts it in sections with the
nose-bone, and it is eaten by the boy, the two end sections first eaten.
These sections must be regularly divided, or the boy will die. The threat
of death in all of these instances, is not from the spears of the old men
but of the supernatural powers, which exercise such dominance over the
minds of the natives that invariably and swiftly they do die.

On this night there is no singing.

Next day, the boy is taken again to the sacred place, guarded by his
yagoo, and the men go hunting, coming back in the afternoon with meat
food, which he is not allowed to share. Before they eat, more blood is
drawn from their arms, and the boy is given his draught. A single string
or rope belt, to which a tassel is attached, is round his waist, a
forehead band above his brow, and his body is caked with human blood.

In the afternoon, some of the men slip away into the bush to swing the
sacred bull-roarer, kalligooroo. The boy is frightened. Those who are
with him add to his fears, saying it is the voice of Nalja. "Nalja ee
ngangga!" (Nalja is talking!), chant the old men. Nalja is the spirit of
an old, old man with white hair, and his voice comes from the hair
beneath his arm-pits. The word "kalligooroo" is never spoken in the
hearing of women or children or the uninitiated, but the voice of Nalja
is known to them all. He is a spirit whom to look upon would be death.

The sound of the kalligooroo comes nearer and nearer, booming weirdly
across the twilight. Should the bull-roarer touch a tree in its
rotations, "Nalja is throwing his boomerang!" the boy is told. The men
rise to their feet in expectancy. The boy shivers with fear and draws
close to his yagoo. Before the swingers have reached the circle, one of
the mother's brothers hides an old mirruroo-kalligooroo, or magic
bull-roarer, almost at the boy's feet, the string and the hole through
which it is passed left above the earth. While he is doing this, the
voice of Nalja is silent.

An uncle now asks the boy did he cook any meat or roots, or has he eaten
any. The boy does not answer. His yagoo points to the spot where the
kalligooroo is hidden, and says, "Your kalligooroo!" The yagoo stoops,
takes it out of the ground and swings it. The boy cannot yet swing it
himself till other initiations have passed. His father then tells him
that the noise he has heard was made by that kalligooroo, and not by
Nalja, but he must never tell the women and children, or he will die. He
is given temporary possession of the sacred bull-roarer, and sleeps with
it under his head. There may be only two or three old kalligooroo in the
camp, but they are highly prized and carefully hidden after each
blood-drinking ceremony. The older and more frail, the greater their
magic, and they are carefully preserved with grease and fresh ochre from
time to time.

On that day, and for many days following the boy again drinks blood.
Sometimes it is a whole moon before the blood drinking period is
finished, and blood is poured over him daily. The length of time the
visitors stay depends upon the food supply. On the last night of the
ceremony, the women and children move their camp still farther away from
the beega, and all night long the savage rites go on, to the roar of the
kalligooroo and the chanting of songs. When the morning star rises, the
men make preparation for a move to the women's camp. Hearing the noise
approaching, the women hide in terror, secreting themselves under the
bushes which they have gathered for the purpose. As the older men come
in, the advance guard, they cry, "Don't look! Shut your eyes! Sleep!"

The men come into a cleared space near the camp, and the boy, who is
covered with blood, half sits, half kneels on the ground and holds in his
arms the vessel from which he has been drinking, darkened and dyed with
blood. As soon as he has taken up this position, an attitude of sheer
sacrificial devotion, the old men rapidly cry, "Did! Did! Did! Did! Did!
Dee, Dee, Dee, Dee, Dee," and the women come from their hiding places.
All behold the boy. His mother and sisters and father's sisters come to
wail over him, and then he is taken away.

The ceremonies conclude with the totemic dances of the turtle, snake, and
other ancestral fathers, and a general orgy.

Returning to their homes through the bush, the visitors sound their
bull-roarer as they travel, and the women and children breathe a sigh of
relief as Nalja goes back to his own country.

The boy now sets out on a journey. His brothers-in-law and uncles make
several nose-bones for him, and these he places in front of his forehead
band. Thus labelled and having a club stuck in his belt, he starts with
his yagoo for the next camp. When his relations in that camp see him,
they know the purpose of the visit, and they do not rise to receive him.
He goes towards the married men's camp, and when he reaches the men,
either touches their feet with his or taps them lightly with the club. He
then goes to the sacred place, and the men, after a time, follow him.
Taking a nose-bone from his head-band, they prepare their arms and
presently fill a bowl, which is always kept there. The boy may drink
their blood two or three times, but there is no, ceremony. Next day he
moves onto another camp. He may cover 150 miles in the journey, and
always he returns by the same route. The blood rites are indulged in
throughout. When he returns to his home-ground, blood-drinking again
takes place, but for the first time he is allowed to eat a little
vegetable food, gathered and prepared by his mother.

Both before and during his travels, he is not allowed to touch a
honey-tree, nor must he remain in the vicinity of one. As soon, however,
as his father has removed the restriction of vegetable food, a father,
uncle, or yagoo brother-in-law will one day find a honey-tree when the
boy is with them. Telling the boy to approach, one of the men rubs his
breast or mouth with the bees' wax, and gives him permission to find
honey for himself. He may not eat flesh food until the last of the blood
has caked, dried and fallen from his body, and he has been anointed with
fat.

During all this period the boy must never speak to, or be touched by,
women and children. Only the most necessary words may be spoken between
him and his yagoo. To talk or laugh at this period would mean death to
the boy's mother. His father's uncle or his-yagoo can impose or break
silence. Jamung-ungur approaches its final stage in the first
sub-incision, an operation performed while the boy is lying on the backs
of his brothers-in-law.

At the next degree, two yagoos obtain opossum fur string and, twisting
two strands of this, each ties up an arm of the young man. They make two
or three rounds, then carry it underneath the arm, over the opposite
shoulder, and diagonally across the back, fastening it in the waist-belt.
Each yagoo attends to his own string only, and the young man sits with
folded arms. Sometimes the string is wound so tightly that he rolls over
and over in an agony of strained muscles, but he must make no sound.
After a day or so the string is replaced by lesser, lighter bonds, and
the man becomes jallooroo, or kambil. He may now wear the forehead-band
and feather plumes, face-markings or red and white ochre, and the belt
and tassel on festive occasions. He may also swing the bull-roarer at
walla-wallong time, and contribute his share of the blood in the making
of jamung-ungur.

A few moons, and his yagoo obtains a pearl shell which he gives to the
oldest fathers and uncles, to be covered with yamminga markings, crude or
symbolic drawings of birds and animals that are his totems and the
totemic fathers of the race. This is prepared in readiness for the
"honey-eating" degree, in which the man is again incised in the same
manner as before. The pearl shell is attached to his belt in front, with
the tassel worn over it. A little later, his father and uncle command him
to bring to them the fat of two species of sting-ray and the blowfish, a
quest which may occupy him for days or weeks. He puts a little charcoal
on chest and face at this time, and when the fat is obtained, is anointed
with it, lying on a bark bed that his mother has made, near to his uncle
and father's own ground. The next day the bark bed is moved to a spot
between the married men's and the bachelors' camps. The chignon has been
removed, and his long hair streams over his shoulders. A long time
elapses before he can dispense with this bark bed, as the sacred fat and
ochre on his back must not touch the earth.

The man is now boongana-honey-eating. A new name is given to him by
father or guardian. It may be a change of name with some yagoo, but it is
not a secret name. In the morning, he goes to the bachelors' camp, and
taking his boomerang, throws it some distance. His yagoo, uncle or
father, reclaims it for him. He throws it again, and this time he himself
must bring it back. This act apparently ends the general services of the
yagoo. Henceforth he stands alone. At this stage, he adds to his
ornaments and insignia necklaces fashioned of pieces of pearl shell and
of kangaroo teeth, the pendant of each it the back of his neck.

After three days, a second anointing makes him maamboongana or talloor,
free from all restrictions as to food. He may eat the wy-ooloo and the
walga-walga-fish that have been forbidden him all his life-and he may
take his wife, if one or more have been betrothed to him in infancy.

The period of these nine degrees covers many years. Not infrequently a
white hair or two will be observed in his beard when he comes, fully
initiated, without any ceremony whatever, to claim his bride or brides.

Chapter VI
THREE THOUSAND MILES IN A SIDE-SADDLE

The wonderful ceremonies of initiation were ended, and with the
corroboree-season over, the natives went back to their work on the
stations and in the township. I could understand now the reason of their
swift passing from a world in which they were an anachronism and of their
withering from contact with the white man's civilization, which can find
no place for the primitive. The year's work with the cattle began, and
the desire came to stock up my own run of 183,600 acres on Ethel Creek in
the Windell area of north Central West Australia.

The frightening names of the locality-Ophthalmia Ranges, Dead Man's Hill,
Grave Creek, and so on, had hitherto deterred other pastoralists from
contemplating settlement there, but they appealed to me, and on my
previous journey by buggy, 1899-1900, I had found that far-out area an
encouraging proposition. I named the property Glen Carrick, in
affectionate remembrance of a dear friend in England, and set about the
purchase of the cattle to stock it.

To watch my mob of 770 well-fed Herefords placidly browsing round the
fringe of Lake Eda, some forty miles east of Broome, brought back vividly
to my mind the inspired lines of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Banjo Paterson and
other Australian poets, whose stirring verses lift droving to the realms
of high adventure. How little I knew! To-day I detest even the picture of
a Hereford cow. I loathe their whitewashed faces, for I have ridden
behind them with eight of my own drovers, for six months, 1,000 miles as
the route went but some 3,000 as I rode it, zigzagging behind the mob at
six or eight or ten miles a day, and every one of the 770 surpassing the
Irish pig in contrariness.

This great mob was, perhaps, the largest number that had travelled down
from the West Kimberleys in a single herd. Stores and equipment I
obtained from Broome, also a cook who was a Maori half-caste, for Broome
was mostly "breed" in those days, with just a few decent whites to leaven
the mass. Sundry droving hands were also engaged, whose knowledge of the
gentle art about equalled mine. We all armed ourselves with a long
stock-whip and, while the head drover and his lieutenant were mustering
and branding, tried to flourish them in true stockman style. After much
climbing into the trees to disentangle the lash, the stock-whips were
quietly rolled up and hidden in the dray, a humble buggy-whip or less
ambitious instrument of sapling and twine taking their place.

My equipment was a good English pig-skin side-saddle with ordinary
stirrup; three pairs of laced wallaby-skin shoes; three habits, a felt
hat, three pairs of riding gloves, and plenty of fly veiling. A compact
hold-all and portmanteau carried all necessaries, and was easily
accessible on the dray, which also carried the stores for the trip and
the drovers' swags.

I undertook the purchase of the "plant" myself. Besides the four fine
draught-horses, there were some thirty-six riding horses for the use of
the drovers, myself, and my son, aged 12. There were a few good stock
horses in the mob, but not one of the drovers owned a cattle dog, a most
necessary adjunct to droving.

On a golden day in the Australian April we lifted the big mob from Lake
Eda and started off behind them. The head drover assigned each one his
position and duties. Some guarded the flanks, the leader and his second
headed the mob; the Maori cook, Davy, took complete charge of the dray,
provisions and spare horses, and the others became the "tailing" hands.

A travelling mob of cows usually shapes itself in the form of a triangle,
the strongest beasts forming the apex, while the stragglers make an
ever-widening line at the rear in their efforts to find food, as the
leaders and flankers consume almost every blade as they go along. All the
cattle had been accustomed to surface water, and while the going was over
the claypan and well-grassed country south of Broome, the big mob
travelled easily. My place and that of my boy, which we retained
throughout the journey, were the base of the triangle, zigzagging to and
fro behind the "tailers."

There is no eight-hour day in a droving camp. All hands are roused at
peep of dawn. Davy had breakfast ready and steaming, horses were brought
in and saddled, and the mob was waked and started. At each night camp,
many of the mothers hid their calves, hoping to make back to them later.
To watch a cow hide its calf behind a four-inch tussock is a lesson in
wild mothercraft. Sunrise generally saw us on the move, the leaders
grazing and the stragglers finding their places at the tail. Back and
forth along this ever-widening tail of cows and calves we rode, with eyes
alert for break-backs. Meanwhile the head man went on to find a night
camp. Davy followed the horse-track and only twice failed to turn up in
time-but even so, he incurred my extreme displeasure on one occasion. The
only greenstuff I had had to eat for weeks, a fresh young lettuce
presented as a gift of grace at one of the stations, he took away and
boiled!

All went well until the Eighty-Mile beach was reached; here the surface
waters ceased, and the wells began. Six canvas buckets, each with a
twenty-gallon capacity, with pulleys and gear, were brought for
emergencies. Most of the wells along the Eighty-Mile were in a bad state,
owing to the disuse of the stock-route, and there was hefty work for all
at the end of each day's droving. The long-disused windlasses, timbering,
and platform more than once gave way, burying bucket and gear and
effectually dosing the wells, so there was nothing for it but to move the
thirsty mob onward. The wells were far apart, and cows in calf are slow
walkers.

At Whistler's Creek, near Lagrange Bay, the sea became visible and with a
"Hurrah swing" of waving tail, the beasts rushed into the bay.
Fortunately the water was shallow at that point, and they were soon on
the road again. Nambeet Well, half-way along the Eighty-Mile, was the
first good well struck, a shallow soak with beautiful and abundant water.
Beside the well was a corrugated iron tombstone, telling of the murder of
a white man named Hourigan by his native boy, for a few ends of tobacco.
The boy was caught and hanged.

Old breakwinds on the slopes surrounding the valley of Nambeet Well
showed that the place was once a favourite camping-ground, but after the
murder no natives would camp there. Some poisonous or stupefying herbage
laid a score or so of our cattle apparently dead there, but we heard
later that they all recovered and returned to their own ground.

The coastline along the beach is only ten to twelve feet above sea-level,
and in all the long stretch of plain only two little pinnacles-Barn and
Church Hills-raise their heads above the level. These little hills were
beacons for the schooners and buggers along the Eighty-Mile beach. A
species of bloated rat, with a thick tail, makes shallow burrows on the
plain, and these pitfalls added to the difficulty of manoeuvring the
thirsty mob. Along the whole length of the beach, we had to carry our
firewood in the dray. There was but one tree, an unburnable "thorny
sand-paper," left standing, covered with axe chops, and impregnable
still.

The first stampede occurred at Barn Hill, and standing on the little
knob, I looked down on a sea of horns and tails and dust as the whole mob
suddenly started back for home and water. At last the galloping drovers
"headed" them again, the sea of dust subsided, and the runaways were
under control.

All along the coast, and right out in the bays are fresh springs bubbling
up through the mud, and at low tide one can see and taste the beautiful
fresh water. Smoke signals of the natives could be seen on the horizon
every day, messages carried on for many miles. The signals were all
identical a long spiral drifting away to the south. The inlanders were
even in those years coming to the coast from ever-increasing distances to
replace the coast groups that had died out, until they, in their turn,
succumbed to the new conditions. Practically all the coastal natives are
now dead, those frequenting the townships and beaches being far inland
"relatives" of the dead tribes.

The long day's tailing made riding very wearisome, and I frequently
changed to the off-side. I noticed that many of the drovers rode
side-saddle now and then, but generally the quick and arduous work of the
wells relieved the weariness of the saddle.

Gradually the Herefords became used to the wells and our only trouble was
the rush to the troughs. We had hoped to reach Glen Carrick before any
calves were dropped, so no lorry had been brought along for day-old
calves. Many had to be killed, owing to forced marches, and their mothers
gave endless trouble, and made night hideous with their bellowing.
Night-long watches, with great fires at various points, became the rule.
More men were needed, and I had to go back to Lagrange Bay to telegraph
for extra hands and horses. The way lay over a wide plain, sparsely
dotted with high ant-hills. I was cantering easily, eyes and thoughts on
the scenery, when my mount began to "pig-jump" and threw me. His trouble
was a slipping saddle-cloth. I caught the reins, and held them, through
all the play that followed, though now and then the flying hoofs came
nearer to my head than was pleasant. At last he quietened down. A twisted
ankle and no mounting block baffled me for a moment, but the horse had
had enough play, and came along to an ant-hill, from the top of which I
mounted and proceeded on the journey.

As we trailed along over the Eighty-Mile, prodding a sturdy little calf
or clubbing a day-old weakling, those of us who were at the base of the
great moving triangle were surprised one morning to see the mob suddenly
split in two, leaving a narrow lane along the centre, and along the lane
quietly walked a Jew pedlar with his huge pack strapped to his back.
Drovers and horses stood like statues as Moses passed through the Red
Sea, never once hastening. The head drovers were waiting for
him-fortunately out of earshot. All that he remarked at the close of
their tirade was. "Who iss the lady mit the veil?"

At Wallal we came to the end of the dreadful Eighty-Mile, good herbage,
good water, and a blessed spell. At the time of our passing, there were
six white men and over a hundred natives at this isolated station.
Supplies were brought to it quarterly by schooner, and though they were
always depleted by travellers long before the schooner was due, the white
men bravely carried on in good times and lean. The new country was better
for the cattle, but the size of the mob necessitated our reaching water
always in good time. The station-owners showed us every courtesy in free
paddocks and water rights, and we, on our part, paid due attention to
time-limit rules.

One night we camped at a beautiful waterhole called Jalliung. Native
legend made Jalliung a bottomless pool, and the home of a magic snake who
devoured any strange black fellow who drank of it.

At Balla-Balla, we replenished our supplies at the little tin store of a
bare-footed and bearded gentleman who told me that he was a brother of
Tiffany, the millionaire-jeweller of New York. Such was the adventurous
and polyglot population of the north-west at that time that he may have
been.

We were accorded a great welcome at the stations. Pardu had suffered a
willie-willie a few weeks before our visit, but the roofless house was
covered by the hospitality of its owners. At the de Grey the finest
four-in-hand of greys that I had seen in West Australia drove out to
greet and take me back for a day's "spell."

In the saddle for eighteen hours a day, from dawn till the sharing of the
night watches, we plodded on. The drovers and cattle stopped for a siesta
at midday, in the worst of the blazing heat. Never able to sleep in the
daytime, I seized the opportunity for explorations and collections of
botanical and geological novelties, which I later forwarded to the
museums.

Marble Bar, which received its name from the mottled bar of quartz which
crosses the Coongan River, is 130 miles from Port Hedland, and Nullagine,
80 miles south of Marble Bar-all mineral-bearing and good pastoral
country. We kept well west of both these townships. It was a dry year,
but the feed was splendid. The mob spread itself out on the flats, wading
knee-deep in lush herbage, grazing leisurely along the wide swathe of
their going. Ashburton pea made a green carpet in the river-beds, so that
the river-beds sometimes became the stock-route. At last we came to the
Shaw Hills, denuded masses of granite, silent and sombre. No sound
greeted us as we climbed hill after hill; the songs of birds are never
heard. Mine was the first dray that ever passed through the Shaw Gorge,
where flood-marks showed some sixty feet above the river-bed. Our last
night there was a nightmare. The rain came down with the darkness. We
were all in a cul-de-sac, cattle, men and horses, our only outlet the
riverbed, along which the flood waters would run. Everyone had had some
experience of the quick rise of these rivers. No one slept, and we all
watched anxiously from our shelters under the rocks. Happily the rain was
light and local but there had been catastrophic floods many times in this
area, and we were deemed fortunate.

In a lonely part of the Shaw, I came upon a native with his two women,
three children and some dogs, all very emaciated. I made them follow to
the camp, and two young calves about a fortnight old were killed and
given to them. Each calf weighed about sixty pounds, but when I rode to
the camp at dawn there was not a bone left to tell the tale only six
human stomachs incredibly distended, and six happy faces grinning
greeting and farewell.

We crossed the Divide, and so came to the Fortescue River and Roy Hill,
with excellent fodder to fatten our herd, now increased to nearly 1,000
head. Day after day we travelled a land of plenty, thick mulga scrub,
succulent salt bush and Mitchell grass. The pioneer of Roy Hill was Peter
MacKay. A few miles from the homestead is a knobby rise where, in the
early days, he was once assailed by a horde of savages. He had his gun
and ammunition, and he was a dead shot, as they well knew. There he
remained for two days without sleep, eking out his portion of damper and
mutton, and keeping the crowd of cannibals at bay. They hurled their
spears and clubs at him, but he had learned to dodge these weapons. On
the third day help came from the station.

Our worst stampede occurred on Roy Hill Property, on one of the station
wells in a fenced paddock. The cattle had had a long and trying day, the
tired calves reluctant to move, and their mothers half maddened with
thirst and distracted with mother love. Horses and men were down and out
with watching and guiding the troublesome beasts, and it was dark when
they had all been safely passed through the fence.

Relying on the security of the mob and the safety of the fence, all hands
immediately unsaddled for a drink of tea, when the cattle broke camp and
rushed the fence, heading straight for Roy Hill and the pools there. The
whole mob, except those too weak to travel, were away in a twinkling.
About 400 tailers, cows and calves, were left to three of us to
water-myself, my little son, and one droving hand, with Davy and the dray
to look after our inner man. The other drovers headed back to many days
of trouble before the stampeders were collected and brought on. Our mob
was too tired to move, even when it heard the squeak of the windlass. My
son and I shared work with the twenty-gallon buckets from early dawn till
late at night, and managed to satisfy our charges by steady lifting and
emptying. The paddock was full of feed, and with plenty of water there
need be no anxiety.

We all divided the night-watch. Nights were still and cloudless. Hercules
and Lyra, Aquila and Cygnus were my fellow-watchers in the silence, on
their way to the mystical west. No sound was heard save the quiet
breathing of the sleeping herd-the little calves snuggled up beside their
mothers in full content. I was thankful that their hard times were over.

A chastened mob was brought back to the paddock, and after a few days'
spell we moved on the lasty eighty miles to Glen Carrick. Pools were full
and frequent in the many creeks and tributaries which rise in the
Ophthalmia Ranges and form the head waters of the Ashburton and
Fortescue. There was no dearth of good feed, and the last part of the
journey was without event. In such good grass was my own little run that
in three months' time the cattle had put on wonderful condition and it
was possible for them to take the six weeks' trip to Peak Hill, there to
be disposed of as "forward stores."

There was no homestead but a bough shade at Glen Carrick, but I remained
there happily for a short period, waiting the opportunity to return to
Port Hedland. At last I secured a passage with one "Black Johnson" a man
who had been taking out a buggy-load of dynamite to a far-distant mine.
We arrived, without any trouble, at Port Hedland, within nine or ten
days. I was in time to embark on the steamer Sultan on the downward
journey to Perth.


Chapter VII

LAST OF THE BIBBULMUN RACE

Perth brought surcease from the struggles and crudeness of the north-west
and refreshing contact with those of my own kin, but it was not to be for
long. The call of the task to which my life had been dedicated was
insistent. It drew me first to solacing the passing of the last of the
Bibbulmun, that once great race which had roamed the fertile coastal
plains on which Perth is set and the delectable uplands of the Darling
Ranges.

The Bibbulmun race was the largest homogeneous group in all Australia.
Their country extended for many hundreds of square miles, and comprised
the extreme triangle of the south-west, its base drawn from about Jurien
Bay, slightly south of Geraldton on the West Coast, to Esperance on the
Great Australian Bight. The Perth groups occupied a wide area, towards
Northam, Toodyay, Gin Gin and Southern Cross on the north, and south to
Bunbury and The Vasse. The last of the uncircumcised hordes, gradually
driven down by a lustier, fiercer people, and finding by chance the
wealthiest and most fertile corner of the State, "sat down" in the
forests by rivers and water-holes of rich flora and teeming fauna,
sharing them with the birds and animals and reptiles that they, believed
to be their "elder brothers" or that became, in the passage of the
centuries, their ancestor-gods.

The word bibbulmun signifies many breasts, a name derived, perhaps, from
the fecundity of that region, or from the unusually great proportion of
women and children among them. There were more than seventy groups in the
Bibbulmun area linked by one language with local variations. They had
neither chiefs or kings nor overlords, and although they were innocent of
arts and crafts, they were by no means savage, and accorded their women
more of initiative liberty than the circumcised. They were the finest
groups in all West Australia. [Probably their prototypes were to be found
in the New South Wales and Victorian coastal tribes, which disappeared
equally rapidly.] The Manitchmat and Wordungmat, the fair and dark people
of the White Cockatoo and Crow, always kept their marriages within the
four class subdivisions of these two primary divisions, which I believe
to be fundamental and Australia-wide. These tribes were not cannibals.
Infanticide was rarely practised except in the case of twins and then
only because of the magic of "two heads" coming where one was expected.
Such was their simple philosophy that the facts of birth were unknown to
them. Their only deity was a woggal or serpent-god, that dominated the
earth, the sky, the sea, and punished evil-doers. They believed that the
spirits of the dead were taken to Kur'an'nup, a land beyond the western
sea.

The only raiment was a fur-skin cloak, made from the skins of seven
kangaroos. Their tools were palaeolithic, with a later intrusion of the
neolithic scarcely evident-a koja, or stone axe with wooden handle
fastened with wattle gum and a rough knife of serrated stone. It is a
question whether to any great extent they used the boomerang, which I
believe to have been an importation, as it was useless in such thickly
timbered country. They had no fighting-shields. The spear, miro, or
spear-thrower, and the club, were their weapons, and spear-dodging was a
consummate art among them. The women carried a wanna, or digging stick,
the usual bark or wooden scoop, and a kangaroo-skin bag. A camp-fire for
winter warmth, and a bough shade for shelter from the sun were their only
homes, fire being made by the friction of a stick applied drill fashion
to the flower-stem of the resinous "black-boy" tree-fern.

These southern people had a sense of hereditary group ownership of their
land, upon which no other tribe might trespass, but all were generously
invited to share its special products in times of plenty, a hospitality
unknown in the poverty-stricken wastes of the great north-west and
centre. The sea-coasts, estuaries and rivers were full of fish, and the
inlanders and hill-folk were always welcome visitors in the spawning and
crabbing seasons. The tall timber country, of which the magnificent
jarrah and karri now occupy a pride of place among the world's hardwoods,
was alive with bird and animal life, and rich with numerous fruits of
shrub and vine, a meeting-place of tribes within hundreds of miles when
the wild potato was in harvest there.

When I came upon the remnants of the Bibbulmun, they had been in contact
with civilization for some seventy years, and in that short time it had
reduced the native inhabitants of the city of Perth and its environs to
one old man, Joobaitch, and an older-looking niece, Balbuk. On this old
man's group area, at the foot of the Darling Ranges, the first reserve
had been established by Lord (then Mr.) Forrest in the nineties, and here
were gathered all that were left of the tribes.

The desire of the Government was that I should base my investigation upon
history and existing data, and build upon the anthropology premises
accumulated by cultured and well-informed men such as Sir George Grey,
Bishop Salvado, G.F. Moore and others. For two years I studied every note
of the bibliography at my disposal regarding the aboriginal tribes of
West Australia, with augmented information from South Australia, Victoria
and other states. I found that in many essentials these Western
Australian authorities contradicted each other, and that it was difficult
to come to a conclusion. So I made the suggestion that I should begin at
the beginning, and seek the truth at the fountain-head.

My first camp was established on the Maamba Reserve near the present
National Park, a few miles from Cannington, to-day an outer suburban area
of great fertility, set with orchards and vineyards, but in the early
years of this century a beautiful kingdom of bush still rich in native
foods and fruits. The Bibbulmun race was represented by some thirty or
forty stragglers, and these would gladly have gone back to their own
various grounds; but their health and sight had failed.

It is saddening indeed to wander the vast expanse of hill and dale and
cliff and grove, and find not one of its own people remaining. They have
vanished from the face of earth as completely as the extinct sthenurus,
of which their far-off ancestors were contemporaries.

The first landing of the white man was the beginning of the end. Often
have I heard the story, a never-failing marvel to the three generations
who survived it, of the landing on the banks of the Swan River in 1829.
In his camp by a little spring called Goordandalup, a wilderness of bush
that is now the metropolitan subdivision of Crawley on the highway of the
Mount's Bay Road, Yalgunga lay dozing in the heat of mid-afternoon. He
did not know that it was 1829, or hear the death-knell of his people. He
knew only that the world was blue and smiling, and the rock-holes filling
with fish in the incoming tide, and that the sun was good. Suddenly he
heard a new sound on the river, a soft continuous sound, and coming
closer. He rose to this feet and looked about instinctively for his
spears. His women crouched round him, and his children ran to him afraid.
Round the bend came an open boat, and the phenomenon of jang-ga, spirits
of the dead who had come back as white men, borne upon the waters. Spears
were useless. Yalgunga waited. Walking as other men, the strangers
stepped ashore and came to him, speaking words that meant nothing. Then
one of them put out a hand in greeting. Yalgunga gratefully clasped it in
his own, and with his other hand made a gesture to his camp and his
spring-they were all he had to offer. That evening he gathered his
family, his spears, and all his belongings, and wandered away to the
swamp at Goobabbilup, which is now Monger's Lake, never to return to the
leafy home and the curve of bush and beach that had been his alone. So
easily had the white man won.

There must have been some tradition handed down from Yalgunga's
forefathers of Vlaming and other earlier arrivals of jang-ga who moved
over the waters in their strange ships, and walked about unafraid, and
returned to Ku'ran'nup. Yalgunga did not know that these later jang-ga
had come to stay. The gazettes of the early thirties made frequent
reference to his peaceable and kindly disposition. It was Maiago, whose
camp was where the Perth Town Hall now stands, who later travelled with
Stokes on his explorations, and who introduced the white man's flour and
rice to the natives, the first instalment of payment for their country.
The rice they buried in the earth, but the flour they appreciated,
calling it always "barragood"-the nearest they could get to the assurance
of "very good" with which it was given to them.

The belief of the Bibbulmun that the first white men were the returned
spirits of their own dead relatives, led to friendly feeling towards the
"spirits" from their first encounter.

A peculiarity of gait, a slight deformity, a scar, a missing toe, finger,
tooth, etc., singled out some white person for special recognition and
friendship. When Sir George Grey was Governor, word came to him that the
old woman Delyungur had recognized in him her long-lost son, and cried
and wept unceasingly in that she could not see him or touch him.

Grey appointed a day for a Native Levee on which all the natives of the
district came to the appointed place and approached the spot where he and
his staff were standing.

A great wailing was presently heard, and as the natives opened their
ranks along the cleared space came old Delyungur, crying and peering to
find the face of her long-dead son. She walked slowly up until her eyes
could see the Governor clearly. Her step became quicker, stronger. She
looked at Sir George, who was looking kindly towards her, and in a moment
she had him in her embrace, crying, "Boondoo, boondoo! bala ngan-ya
Kooling" (True, true, he is my son), as she fondled the face and form of
her long-lost son and wept for joy at their re-union.

Sir George Grey's gentle sufferance of her embraces strengthened
immeasurably the friendly bond between the black and white in those early
days. His kindly reception of old Delyungur, who was sister to Yalgunga's
dead mother Windera, became known to every group throughout the
metropolitan area.

What a surprise the fences, and the sheep and horses and cattle within
their boundaries, and the telegraph line with its magic messages swifter
and truer than smoke signals, and the ships sailing into the estuaries,
and the jetties and wharves built out to meet them! Who shall say what
vague despair and unrest entered these primitive minds as the natives
beheld one after another of their cherished homing spots ruthlessly swept
away in the resistless march of civilization, and the winding tracks to
their various food grounds obliterated by houses and streets?

They could no longer seek for the goonoks in their season, their
mungaitch honey-groves were cut down to make way for flocks and herds.
Could they hunt for the bai-yoo nuts of the Zamia, the warrain, and the
joobok roots on the slopes, when the white men had fenced them in, and
driven their old friends beyond the pale? On their own country they were
trespassers. There was no more happy wandering in the interchange of
hospitality. Sources of food supply slowly but surely disappeared, and
they were sent away to unfamiliar places, compelled to change completely
their mode of life, to clothe themselves in the attire of the strangers,
to eat foods unfitted for them, to live within walls.

Their age-old laws were set aside for laws they could not understand. The
younger generations, always wilful, now openly flouted the old, and
defied them, and haunted the white man's homes, protected by his
policeman. A little while, and they resorted to thieving-where theft had
been unknown-and sycophancy, and sold their young wives to the depraved
and foreign element. Half-castes came among them, a being neither black
nor white, whom they detested. They died in their numbers of the white
man's diseases, measles, whooping-cough, influenza, and the results of
their own wrong-doing.

Change of food, environment, outlook, the burying of the old traditions
and customs, inhibitions and the breakdown of the laws all conspired to
bring degeneration, first to the individual and then to the race. Can we
wonder that they faded so swiftly? Can we blame them for the sudden
reactions that found vent in violence in certain instances few and far
between, punished sometimes with terrible reprisals on the part of the
white man?