CHAPTER VIII.
THE BLOODY SKIRT OF SETTLEMENT.
“I had always heard the Indian (North American) spoken of as a revengeful, bloodthirsty man. To find him a man capable of feelings and affections, with a heart open to the wants and responsive to the ties of social life, was amazing.”—From the Memoirs of Henry R. Schoolcraft, the hero-explorer of “Garden of the West” fame.
OR the purposes of our narrative we must turn back in our portfolio of Australian reminiscences, and present to our readers a sketch of an event that took place sixteen years previous to the date of the commencement of our story.
An August evening is sealing up in long red rows of clouds another day of the year of 1873. The scene before us is the heart of the weird “Never, Never Land,” so-called by the earliest pioneers from the small chance they anticipated, on reaching it, of ever being able to return to southern civilization. Eight hundred miles in a direct line nor’-north-west from Sydney on the sea-board, and over fifteen hundred miles by the dreary ways a traveller must follow, the sand-hills, clay-paws, and low sandstone prominences of the district, now called the country of the Upper Mulligan, was still a terra incognita to Europeans on the aforementioned evening. It is true those ill-fated heroes, Burke and Wills, had passed through it twelve years before; but, poor fellows, they were hurrying southwards for the relief that came too late, and had no time to take much notice of the country. Night is coming on, with that gloamingless presumption that is mentioned as one of the oddities of the new land by most new chum visitors to tropic Australia, in their epistolary offerings to friends in the old country. The crimson clouds just above the horizon flash out brighter than before, as the sun sinks its lower edge behind the dim grey-blue line of dreary sand-hills. The earth grows darker suddenly, and the bosom of the piece of water in the foreground, is led and fringed with graceful lignum bushes, and backed by a picturesque outline of broken sandstone cliffs, becomes lighter by contrast as all else merges into purple shadows. Native companions (a large kind of crane) croak hoarsely high overhead, as they follow the sun westward, across the violet expanse of sky, to their feeding grounds by the salt lakes; large buzzards, called turkeys by the Australian settlers, come out to wrangle over grubs by the water’s side; mosquitoes rise in shrill-voiced, murmuring clouds to address the night-feeding fauna of the locality, vice swarms of persistent house-flies retired, the latter having now festooned themselves in countless myriads upon the zigzag branches of the Gidea scrub around; dingoes are slinking by, like the guilty shadows of departed thieves, to the dark, slippery mud-pools, where the overflow of the water-hole (a small lake left in an intermittent river’s bed) has formed a broken, snake-haunted swamp; and all the life of the half-desert country around this part of the Parapee (now Mulligan) river gathers to enjoy the moisture, the comparative coolness, and the food-producing qualities of this Australian oasis.
Westward across the dreary salt pans, were we to follow the pelicans and native companions in their evening flight, we should find bitter lakes, with dazzling fringes of snowy salt, and strange—and, according to native legend, Cunmarie-haunted—mound springs. There, also, in the neighbourhood of the rocky Gnallan-a-gea Creek and sand-locked Eta-booka, we may find the wondrous Pitchurie plant (of the poisonous order of Solanacea). Growing here, and nowhere else in Australia (at the time we write of), the location of this valuable native drug, with its lanceolate leaves and white flowers,—that fires the warrior, soothes the sufferer, and inspires the orator,—was shrouded by the cunning protectionist inhabitants of the wilds with the grimiest, most mysterious surroundings their medicine men could possibly invent. Black boiling lakes, Cerberus-like portiers, half man, half emu, and devils of the most uncivil type were supposed by the natives of other districts to guard this sole source of revenue, in the shape of boomerangs and red ochre, of the Paree and Mudlow country.
Eastward a matter of twenty miles from the water-hole are the castellated “spires and steeples” of a long range of flint-crowned sandstone hills, whose débris has covered the intervening country with an almost unbroken “dressing” of glaring yellow and red brown stones, or “gibbers.” If we were to follow the river bed southwards we should come upon magnificently grassed flats, now covered with the shorthorns of various squatter-kings.
On the sandy summit of a mass of brittle, broken sandstone, overlooking the water-hole, is the chief camp of the aboriginal inhabitants of the district. The father of this little hamlet—if we can honour the collection of beehive-like, mud-coiffured gunyahs by that name—belongs to the strong class-family, or totem, of the Mourkou (ignana-lizards); and, food being plentiful, enemies scarce, and no death-avenging troubles on hand, the little community is happy and contented on this winter evening, as the sun goes down. The smoke from the camp-fires curls up fearlessly from the tree-studded flat below the village, setting the More-Porks (night-jars of Australasia) coughing in the branches; and the peaceful though monotonous chants of infant-suckling mothers come with a soft lullaby murmur upon the ear. There is something very soothing about these native Yika-wimma (literally, milk songs), although we have heard them facetiously likened to the buzz of a meat-tin-imprisoned blow-fly; but, anyhow, their effect on a quiet evening like this is perfectly in sympathy with the spirit of the surroundings. Presently some twenty male natives, naked almost as the day they were born, collect round one of the fires, and proceed to discuss the merits of sundry lizards, fish, and bandicoot which have been roasted on the embers. The menu also includes two varieties of potato-like roots,—Kylabra, a rather rare climbing plant, and that yellow-flowered “praty” of the interior, Tintina. The women sit patiently waiting for their turn to come, each watching her particular lord, much as a brown-eyed collie does his master, but scarcely ever ceasing their droning song. Now and then their patience is rewarded by a morsel being flung to them; and by-and-by, at a few words from the village-father—there is no real chief in these truly socialistic circles—the men gather round him to hold a consultation of some importance, the “ladies” immediately proceeding to do justice to what remains of the dinner. The men now gathered round the white-haired old native are mostly athletic-looking fellows, whose dark, naked skins, freshly polished with the fragrant fat—to an aboriginal’s olfactory ideas—of the ignana, shine in the firelight like the dark oaken carvings of saints in an Antwerp cathedral during midnight mass. The younger men and the boys (derrere), who keep at a respectful distance, and have eaten their meal apart from the fully-initiated males, are far from bad-looking as a rule. Ceaseless fun and joking, with occasional tale-telling, is going on amongst the youths; and presently they skip off into the shadows of the wurleys (huts) on the hill, where one of their number tells the oft-repeated native yarn of the “Crow and the Parula Pigeon,” amidst the shrieks of laughter of his delighted audience as they open their white-ivoried jaws in merriment at his imitations of the car-car, car-car, of the feathered rascal of the story.
The middle-aged men have the usual distinctive characteristics of all Australian aborigines,—the slightly-made, calfless leg; the brilliantly-expressive yet bloodshot eyes; the short, flat, “tip-tilted” nose and strongly emphasized corrugator muscles of the forehead. They wear their hair generally in a matted collection of wiry curls, cut so as to fall round their heads in the modern high-art fashion; but some, having need of materials for fishing-net and line making, are cultivating their locks into cone-shaped elevations, by means of bands of grass. All of them stalk, rather than walk, as they move about, with long, from-the-hip strides that remind one of Harry Furniss’ caricatures of Irving. And what is particularly noticeable is, that the hunted-thief look one nearly always sees on the face of the average “station boy” (squatter’s aboriginal servant) is absent.
“What does the father of my mother’s sister, Pirruup, the clever sandpiper, think of these warnings, of these warnings?” chants one of the men, addressing the grey-haired patriarch, who sits a little apart from the rest, all being now squatting on their hams around the fire. “Shall Deder-re-re, of the duck-haunted Bindiacka water-hole, tell us once more of the strangers he saw, so that all may hear?”