Old Melbourne Memories / Second Edition, Revised

by Rolf Boldrewood

These strangely-named individuals had been familiar to our ears ever since our arrival. "Jupiter" was supposed to have a title to the head chieftainship of the tribe which specially affected the Rocks and the neighbourhood of the extinct volcano. Cocknose had been named by the early settlers from the highly unclassical shape of the facial appendage. He was known to be a restless, malevolent savage. Again on the war trail next morning, we tried beating up and down among the paths by which the cattle went to water, at the lower portion of the great marsh. It may be explained that the summer of 1844 was exceptionally dry, and much of the surface water having disappeared, the cattle were compelled to walk in Indian file through the ti-tree, in many places more than ten feet in height, to the deeper portion of the marsh, where water was still visible.

Here Joe Burge hit off a trail, which seemed likely to solve the mystery. "Here they've been back and forward, and pretty thick too," he said, getting off and pointing to the track of native feet, plain enough in the swamp mud.

"Cattle been here," said the old stockman, "and running too. Look at thim deep tracks. The thieves of the world, my heavy curse on them!"

As we followed on the trail grew broader and more plain. A few head of cattle had evidently been surrounded—two or more bullocks, we agreed, and several cows and calves, heading now in this direction, now in that. Presently half of a broken spear was picked up. We followed the track to a thick brake of reeds nearly opposite to a jutting cape of the lava country. There we halted. A new character was legible in the cipher we had been puzzling out.

"They've thrown him here," said the old man. "Here's where he fell down. There's blood on that tuft of grass; and here's the mark of the side of him in the mud. They've cut him up and carried him away into the Rocks, bit by bit—hide and horns, bones and mate. The divil resave the bit of Magpie ever we'll see again. There's where they wint in."

Sure enough we saw a plainly-marked track, with a fragment of flesh, or a blood-stain, showing the path by which they had carried in a slaughtered animal. Further we could not follow them, as the lava downs were at this spot too rough for horses, and we might also have been taken at a disadvantage. So, on the second evening, we rode home, having found what we went out to seek, certainly, but not elated by the discovery.

It now became a serious question how to bear ourselves in the face of the new state of matters. If the blacks persisted in a guerilla warfare, besides killing many of the best of our cattle, they would scatter and terrify the remainder, so that they would hardly stay on the run; besides which, they held us at a disadvantage. They could watch our movements, and from time to time make sorties from the Rocks, and attack our homesteads or cut us off in detail. In the winter season much of the forest land became so deep and boggy that, even on horseback, if surprised and overmatched in numbers, there would be very little chance of getting away. By this time the owners of the neighbouring stations were fully aroused to the necessity of concerted action. We had reached the point when "something must be done." We could not permit our cattle to be harried, our servants to be killed, and ourselves to be hunted out of the good land we had occupied by a few savages.

Our difficulty was heightened by its being necessary to behave in a quasi-legal manner. Shooting blacks, except in manifest self-defence, had been always held to be murder in the Supreme Courts of the land, and occasionally punished as such.

Now, there were obstacles in the way of taking out warrants and apprehending Jupiter and Cocknose, or any of their marauding braves, in the act. The Queen's writ, as in certain historic portions of the west of Ireland, did not run in those parts. Like all guerillas, moreover, their act of outrage took place sometimes in one part of a large district, sometimes in another, the actors vanishing meanwhile, and reappearing with puzzling rapidity.

We went now well armed. We were well mounted and vigilantly on guard. The Children of the Rocks were occasionally met with, when collisions, not all bloodless, took place.