Goggle Eye said you learnt all this at corrobborees. At the kangaroo-corrobboree the head man of the kangaroo men dressed up, and pretended to be a kangaroo. After a little while he suddenly changed into a man, and stood up, and looked like one, and said he really was a man now. Then he dug a little hole and poured water into it. After this he called a number of kangaroo-spirit men to him and offered them the flesh of a kangaroo, but they said it was the flesh of their brother, and that they must not eat it.
The wise men then explained that this was to teach them that once, long long ago, a big giant kangaroo had come to the Roper River country, and changed himself into a man. When he got thirsty he dug a hole, and water flowed up into it for him to drink, and that was really how the homestead “billabong” came.
After a while this kangaroo man amused himself with making spirits, but as he was really a kangaroo spirit himself, he could only make kangaroo spirits. By and by he noticed that some of them had got into kangaroos and some into little black children, so he called them all together and told them that they all had kangaroo spirits and were really brothers and must never eat each other.
After this explanation all the young men of the tribe understood of course that they must not eat their animal brothers. At honey-bee-corrobborees, the history of the honey-bees was taught, and at each animal corrobboree, the history of each totem, for corrobborees, as I said before, were the schools of the blackfellows.
Goggle Eye, you see, was one of the wisest of the blackfellows, and as he said this was true, perhaps it was. I know that “out-bush” we had seen portraits of the great-great-greatest grandfather of the Kangaroo men, and of the Fish and of the Iguana people, drawn on rocks and trees by the artists of the tribe.
When Goggle Eye had finished his history lesson, I gave him some sugar in a calico bag, and he tied it carefully round his neck. He said the ants couldn’t get at it there. Then I gave him a red handkerchief and some tobacco and hairpins. The blacks love hairpins, they find them so useful to dig up grubs with.
As Goggle Eye still stayed about, I said good-bye, and turned to leave him.
“Missus,” he called after me, “me bin lose ‘em pipe.” Something in his face made me suspicious. I went and looked behind the antbed to see what he had hidden, and found his pipe.