Colonial Born: A Tale of the Queensland bush

by G. Firth Scott

And the old man had seen the white men come.

He had seen them come with their flocks and herds—the food the black-fellow knew was coming. He had seen them come with shouts and rage when the black-fellow ate the food they brought him. He had seen them swoop on a tribe at peace, without a sign that they sought for war, till the warriors lay on the red earth, dead, slain by the power the white men had. He had seen them ride where the children played; he had seen them charge where the women stood; he had seen the gunyahs set on fire, the war-spears burned, the tokens scorned, till his race had fled from their tribal lands to the barren ridges and sandy plains, where they starved and died off one by one, till he was alone—and his faith was gone.

The creed and the faith he had learned and loved; the tribal lore and the ordered rite; the lesson, the trial, and the test of strength—they had all been wrong when the white man came. And now he was old and worn and sad, there was one idea, one hope, he had—that before he died he might wet his hands with the blood of the men who had spoiled his life.

As he sat blinking at the glow of his fire, just as he had sat for days past, he heard a sudden commotion amongst the men who were lounging in the shade, and, looking up, he saw four horsemen approaching through the bush. The men had also seen them, and were going towards them to beg tobacco. Some young gins stood by a gunyah, and he saw one of the horsemen point to them, and turn and say something to his companions. The sound of their voices came to him—and then he saw two of them ride at the men till they scattered and fled, while the other two rode at the gins.

The old man sat without a move or a sound through all the turmoil and confusion; but when the men wandered back, hours afterwards, when the sounds of the horses' hoofs were growing faint in the distance and the sky was ruddy with the setting sun, they found him sitting by his fire, with the clothes of the white race flung away, his old withered body daubed with splodges of white clay, and with a mass of white clay plastered on his head. He was slowly rocking himself to and fro, and chanting, in a quavering voice, a weird and mournful song. Everywhere else there was silence; no fires glowed by the gunyahs or anywhere, save near where the old man sat, and neither woman nor child could be seen.

The ways of their fathers were little to the men, for the time that should have been spent in teaching them the customs and the creed had been spent in fleeing from the bullets of the white men and seeking out-of-the-way barren spots where neither white men nor the white men's stock were likely to penetrate; but they knew enough to understand the signs of deep mourning the old man had assumed, and to recognize the dirge as the wail for those who had fallen while defending their women.

As the men came nearer they came slower, till they crept up to the fire where it smouldered, and sat round it, silent and uneasy, as the sun sank out of sight and the moon came up, while the old man crooned his dirge. The white light of the moon showed over the trees, throwing into profound shade all else, save where the glow of the fire showed red. The air grew chill now the sun had gone, and it was long since the men had fed; but they still sat silent round the smouldering fire.

Suddenly one arose with a gesture of impatience, and, stepping back behind the old man, flung off the ragged shirt and trousers that he wore, and shook out the tangled mass of his hair free from the compression the slouch hat he had been wearing left on it. A lump of white clay lay on either side of the old man, and the younger, yielding to some impulse which was upon him, stooped and daubed himself over with it in streaks and splashes, and then went back to the fire and sat down again.

The old man sang neither louder nor faster, nor gave any sign that he saw or understood; but another of the men got up and flung away the clothes he was wearing, and daubed the white clay on his naked skin, and came back to the fire again. Then another did the same; then another, and another, until all were naked, and all were daubed with clay, and all were sitting round the fire, silent, as the old man crooned.

As the last one came back he looked up. Presently he ceased his dirge and spoke, telling in an apparently unimpassioned way of the doings of the warriors when he was a young man. He spoke of the pride the tribe felt when one of their men faced and fought, single-handed, the band of another tribe; and told how once one man had followed the enemy day and night, while the moon grew old and died, and grew again before he caught them—caught and slew them. Tales of daring, tales of vengeance, of wrongs redressed, of vows redeemed; tales of the tribal might in the days when their fathers ruled, he told them; and as they heard, something of the old spirit came again to them as the inherited instincts of countless generations stirred their blood and warmed their hearts. The sloth they put on with the cast-off clothes of the white invader fell away from their natures as the voice of the old man droned in their ears. Half-forgotten memories of the war corroborees, danced in the far-off days when the tribe was ever moving and ever fighting against the white men; recollections of blood-stained figures of warriors, left on the camping-ground when the rest of the tribe fled before the storm of the white men's bullets, flitted through their brains; stray shreds of tribal wails and dirges, melancholy and depressing, which had terrified them in their childhood, seemed to blend with the voice of the old man, and the eyes which had been dull and heavy began to grow bright and to glitter. Soon the breasts began to heave as the men breathed faster; the white of a man's teeth gleamed as he opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again in anger as he realized that the words which came to his lips were words in the white man's tongue. Quickly a man sprang to his feet, and stood with the red glow of the embers playing over his swarthy skin and the spots and streaks of the wet white clay. Another sprang up and leaped away into the darkness, but returned a moment later with a bundle of long, thin, pointed sticks, which he flung to the ground by the fire. They were the spears the men had made, rough, crude implements compared with the balanced and decorated weapons their fathers had known, but such as would serve to satisfy the hereditary impulse of a decadent race for the weapons of their sires. With one accord the men reached out and seized them, springing to their feet, and standing, with quivering muscles and tremulous hands, as the struggle between inherited instinct and acquired fear went on for the mastery of their beings.