Colonial Born: A Tale of the Queensland bush

by G. Firth Scott

BLACK AND WHITE.

In an isolated part of barren country, where the grass was sparse and coarse, the soil poor and stony, and the timber stunted and scraggy; where, in fact, everything for which the white man had neither use nor need was to be found, and where nothing existed that he or his stock could utilize—a black-fellow's camp was situated.

It was a primitive affair, as black-fellow's camps always are. A few long, thin sticks, looped and stuck in the ground, and with a miscellaneous collection of bark and branches laid over them, formed the huts, or gunyahs, which gave a temporary shelter against wind or rain, and could be left standing, or thrown down, when the tribe moved, without loss. Small fires smouldered near each, and, round about, half a dozen chocolate-coloured piccaninnies, innocent of clothes, ran and played, laughing and chattering to one another. In the shade the men were lounging, indolent and indifferent, wearing such cast-off clothes as they had been able to beg or steal from station hands, and smoking tobacco obtained by a similar process. In the heat and sunshine the women worked at such tasks which need demanded—the search for edible roots and grubs and the gathering of wood for the fires—or lounged, as their lords and masters did, indolent and indifferent. An old man, whose hair and beard were grizzled, and whose flesh was shrunk and withered, sat in the shade of his gunyah, gazing dreamily and wearily at the glowing ends of the sticks and the thin column of blue smoke which rose so steadily in the still air from them.

He was the last of his generation; the last of the tribe who remembered the days when first the white man came; the last to feel and sorrow for the days when tribal law and tribal rite ruled the destinies of the race. Very far back, when he was little more than a piccaninny, and long before he was ripe for the ceremony which made him a "young man," he recalled how his tribe had been perplexed by a story which had come to them, by a tale of strange happenings brought from other tribes somewhere away in the far distance. Later, when he was grown and had been made a young man and a warrior, he learned the story in full, and wonderful it seemed to him, as wonderful as it seemed to all his tribe, old men and young men alike. For it meant the coming of that which would explain and render clear all the mysteries treasured up by the wise men and the old men, and shown, still in mystery and only in part, to the young men as they passed through the stages of their initiation. In short, it meant to him, and to his, the fulfilment of their religion, the vindication of their faith, the perfecting of their creed.

In the matters of creeds and abstract faiths many men make many methods. Some are fitted for the daily use of men counting into millions; some touch only a minute few, and shrink from the common gaze; some, again, serve the needs and lives of men having simple ways, and some sustain a despot's power and hold the race as slaves: but in every case they are false and wrong save the one that a man may hold. The religious faith of the tribe to which the old black-fellow belonged formed a pitiful mass of crudities, oddities, and absurdities to the white men when they came, or to such white men as stopped for a moment to think on the matter at all. But it was very real to the old black-fellow, as it was to his comrades and tribesmen, when it came to be unfolded to them in all the impressive solemnity of fast, vigil, and ceremony. How could it be otherwise when the ordeal of bodily pain accompanied every step in the knowledge of the mysteries?

Overhead, by the Southern Cross, a black patch shows in the sky. The white man calls it the coal-sack, and explains how it comes about. The black-fellow looked at it in wonder, and worked his brains for the reason of its existence and the use that it might serve, and gradually, unconsciously, inexplicably, there crept into the lore of the nomad tribes the story of its origin and the use it had to serve.

The stars of night were camp-fires, alight on a mighty plain; the Milky-way was a she-oak grove; and the gentle winds that blew at night waved the trees and shook the boughs, and so made the fires gleam from beneath their shadow, fitful and subdued. By every fire a black-fellow camped on his journey over the plain—the journey that every man must take when the days of his life were done; for in the long ago a man had strained till he found what the black patch was. It was an opening through to the mighty plain; but when he had reached it, he longed for his brother to join him and wander over it with him. Looking down he saw his brother, and called to him, and, to help him up, threw down a rope, up which the brother climbed. But when he also reached the plain, he wanted to turn back and go down again, and lowered the rope to do so; but before he could start, he saw that another black-fellow had caught hold of the rope and was climbing up. And when he came up, he also threw down the rope again to one of his tribe; and the two brothers, becoming impatient, set out to march across the plain to where it touched the earth, where they could get down without the help of the rope.

A falling star, the white men said, was the rope the black-fellows saw; and they laughed as the blacks crouched down in fear by the camp-fire when they caught the flash of a shooting star. But that was afterwards—after the time when the things had happened which made the old black-fellow sad and weary.

The journey was long over the mighty plain—so long that as a black-fellow wandered he wore out the colour of his skin and became white. Somewhere in the dim, unknown past, a legend told how some of the black-fellows had really come back from the plain, reaching the earth where the end of the plain touched it; but when they rejoined their tribes they had not been recognized, and so had gone away again in anger. None had come since then, but the tribes treasured up the hope that some day the mistake their ancestors had made would be forgotten, and those who found their way across the plain would come back and tell them of the land above. The hope, fostered on legend and ceremony, grew at length into a creed, and from a creed into a faith, and the time was looked forward to when the wandering black-fellows, grown white in the journey, should come back; for then it would be no longer necessary to climb through the black patch, nor to fear the falling rope. Then would drought or flood cease to trouble, for plenty of food and plenty of water would be every man's share when the people of the great plain came back.

When the old man was a piccaninny the story travelled from the south that the white men had reached the earth again, and had come in tribes and in tribes of tribes, more than the black-fellow could count, more than the black-fellow could understand. When he was made a "young man," he was told of it, and told how men of his own tribe, who had gone up through the coal-sack by the blazing rope, were coming back; and how, when they came back, the black-fellow's life would be never-ending, with food enough every day to satisfy his appetite, and no flood, no drought, no sickness, nothing but life—free, happy, and enjoyable.