PRIMITIVE VICTORIA
CHARLES DICKENS has created characters which will assuredly live for
ever. If he had invented real animals instead of imaginary people—who
are much more real than many real people, because more clearly drawn—I
would attribute to him all the strange beasts of Australia which, for the
most part, are absurdly Pickwickian. They are so clumsily and curiously
formed, their expressions are so alert and inquisitive, their limbs are
so oddly proportioned. Indeed, I could never see a kangaroo without
thinking of a picture by Cruikshank of the Artful Dodger, with his long
trousers, huge feet, and look of cocksure cunning; or a native-companion,
without reviving at the same time a mental picture of the fascinating
Jingle. Besides, though, like the characters of Dickens, the Australian
animals are so odd as to be almost unbelievable; they are yet intensely
human. They have not the expression of animals. They know really too
much. Of course, they were like that long, long before the days of
Dickens, but Nature has odd freaks of humour, and perhaps they were the
outcome of one such freak and the novelist’s imagination of another. I
know one has no business to propound theories like this in a book that is
trying hard to be matter of fact, but it is no use blinking the fact that
the Australian animals are pure farce, save only, and above all, in their
management of that greatest of all affairs—maternity.
What an extraordinary thing it does seem that Nature should have invented
anything so absolutely perfect as the pouch, and then, apparently,
forgotten about it. To see a woman—a mere woman—her baby, with its
pathetically nodding head, clasped in one arm, which, in addition, is, as
often as not, further weighted with string bags and baskets, while the
other hand clutches skirt, and umbrella, and the wrist of a toddling
two-year-old—to see this, I say, and then to think of the safe babies of
the Australian forests, gives one pause. The lubra does her best, in
spite of Nature’s stinginess, and slings her baby across her hip or over
her back in a shawl or length of calico, or at the worst a strip of
gum-fibre. But the European mother, even in Australia, for the most part
sits it upright on the crook of her arm, or clasps it with agonizing
firmness round its middle, at an age when the little marsupial, swinging
at ease in its mother’s pouch, learns to know the look of the world,
while it sniffs the fresh air and crops the daintiest fronds of grass;
all in perfect safety, with no risk, even, of damp feet.
At times I have literally haunted the Melbourne Zoo just for the fun of
watching the kangaroos and seeing the tiny little heads peering out from
the mother’s pouch, and particularly remember one snow-white
mother-kangaroo I once saw, a rare and beautiful creature.
I do not quite know the difference that exists between the kangaroos and
wallabies, excepting in point of size, the wallabies being a good deal
the smaller. There is a walking club in Melbourne to which a good many
professional men belong, calling itself “the Wallaby Club,” the members
of which walk—every other Sunday, I believe it is—mostly from somewhere
where they have had lunch on to somewhere else where they have tea, and
then stay and dine; also indulging in periodical dinners in town, with
punning menus and toast-cards, often exceedingly witty. Then, again, an
expression used for what in England we call “tramping,” is “going on the
wallaby,” otherwise “humping the swag,” or “the bluey,” or “sun-downing.”
Smaller still than the wallabies are the kangaroo rats, which are about
the size of a large cat. I do not know if they are ever seen in
Victoria; but my only acquaintance with them was in New South Wales, at a
little farm where they used to come in any number on to the veranda at
night, after the house was shut up; seeking for crumbs and scraps, I
expect, as we had many of our meals there. The sound of their jumping
feet on the bare boards used to make such a noise that I would often get
up to “shoo” them away; then stand quite fascinated watching their antics
in the bright moonlight. I believe they are quite easy to tame, if only
they can be caught young enough, like all the kangaroo tribe; but as yet
I have never had the chance of trying, though for a long time I had a
tiny tame opossum, who used to love to creep up my coat sleeve, and sleep
comfortably against my shoulder, in the little pent house formed by the
fulness at the top.
In Victoria kangaroos and wallabies are still to be found in the woods
and on the wide, open plains, though each year they become more and more
scarce; while among the forest trees, if you are very quiet and patient,
you may yet meet with a wombat—particularly in the eastern part of the
state—or a lumbering native bear, like nothing on earth so much as a
child’s woolly toy, really the most ingratiating creature. Standing
about two feet high, and covered with soft, thick fur, it has an odd,
blunt, wistful sort of a nose, with little round eyes like boot-buttons,
and makes one of the most charming of pets, if it can only be caught
young enough. The native bear carries its baby on its back—the two
little paws clasped tightly round its neck and buried deep in its fur—and
climbs, thus encumbered, up the highest gum-trees, and from bough to
bough, nibbling at the tender young leaves; the mildest person in the
world, the very turn outwards of its toes giving it an almost absurdly
apologetic air. “I have been left behind,” it seems to say; “but do,
please, let me go on in my own way—I and these wise old woods; we
understand one another, and life and leisure are pleasant things.” The
wombat is heavier and clumsier, and its fur darker in hue, but it, too,
is slow and peaceful in all its ways, the opossum, indeed, being the
gadabout of the forest.
There is now a national park at William’s Promontory, which is the most
southern point of Victoria—indeed, of the whole of Australia—where it is
hoped that many of the rapidly-decreasing and unique wild animals of the
continent may be induced to breed and otherwise make themselves at home,
though, oddly enough, the kangaroos—true kangaroos, for there are any
number of wallabies—have been found the most difficult to procure of all
the animals. Still, there are koalas, and wombats, bower-birds,
lyre-birds, and many others—though whether there is or is not a platypus
I am unable to say; but the scarcity of kangaroos is appalling to all
lovers of Nature-life, who remember how Flinders, in his book, tells of
the huge flocks of those animals abounding along the shores of the new
colony, so numerous and so tame that they could easily be killed with
clubs or the butt-end of the men’s guns.
Every year, however, the number of truly wild animals of Australia is—sad
to say—lessening as surely as are the aborigines, though, perhaps, more
slowly. In a book about Victoria, written by the old colonist, modestly
hiding his identity under the pseudonym of “A Pioneer,” we are told of
the immense numbers of the kangaroos, which in the old days were a source
of serious worry and loss to the squatter, who used to gather together
parties of his neighbours—anyone within a hundred miles coming under that
heading—and, forming a cordon, drive them into some enclosed place and
then shoot them. The scene is described in stilted Early Victorian
phraseology, but yet brings to our mind the most vivid picture of the
intense excitement of such a drive. On one station of 100,000 acres some
5,000 kangaroos were killed by driving them into a specially prepared
cul-de-sac, ending with a great pit at the far end of a blind fence, as
many as 500 a day having been destroyed, while as the animals began to
realize that some awful danger was overtaking those in front of them,
their efforts to escape, says “A Pioneer,” both by creeping under the
horses and leaping over them, became little short of frantic.
When “A Pioneer” first landed in Melbourne in 1840, there was, where Port
Melbourne now stands, one “mean, solitary cottage on the beach, boasting
the name of Liardet’s Hotel”—rather an ominous combination of syllables,
one might imagine. But the owner of it, Captain Liardet, seems to have
been a very good fellow, and, meeting the newcomer at the ship, rowed him
up the river, thick with wild duck and black swan, to the city of tents
and shanties, where the entire space now occupied by Government buildings
was one dense scrub. Later on he writes of his experiences at the time
of the gold rush, when he and his partner drove a mob of cattle to
Melbourne, and found there neither butchers, slaughterers, nor buyers.
He tells, too, of the annoyance that the “cocky” farmers even then were
to the more settled colonists; how, on paying one pound an acre, or five
shillings down and promising the rest, they could pick out the very best
bits from the run; often ruining the squatter by taking the entire river
frontage or water-holes, till the banks came forward, and in some measure
checked the evil by advancing money to the squatters on the security of
their leases, to a sufficient extent to enable them to buy the land.
Mrs. Frank Madden—the Speaker’s wife—once told me a very amusing story of
the biter being bit by overreaching himself. A “cocky” had picked out a
very fine slice of an estate on the Murrumbidgee, at the river-edge, as
he thought. The squatter and his wife had been as kind as possible to
the man and his wife, and the kindness of the people in the country
districts in Australia is something worth having. But the new-comers, a
common, mean, little Glasgow man and his wife, had been bitterly jealous
of the comfort and refinement of their neighbours’ home—in which,
by-the-by, they had been staying while their own was building—and, once
settled, they determined on equalling matters up. They had picked out
and fenced a long narrow strip along the water-edge, and absolutely
refused to let the squatter’s sheep be driven through it to drink, so
that the poor beasts had to trail many miles before they could reach the
water, many actually dying of thirst on the way, for, as the whole estate
had originally run along the river-edge, no water-holes had been dug.
In vain the squatter and his wife remonstrated and pleaded, and offered
money; the mean little wretch’s envy and spite proved even greater than
his rapacity, and he absolutely refused to concede an iota of his right.
The squatter might well have been driven distracted, but for one thing.
He knew that it was only a matter of time. Before the “cocky” had taken
up the land there had been heavy rains, and the river had swollen, and
flooded fully a mile of the land at either side, and along the edge of
that flood the stranger had pegged out his claim. Gradually it began to
seem to him that the water—day by day, inch by inch—was slipping away
from his border. Then, as the whole truth dawned on him, he drove off
post-haste to the nearest town to buy up the rest of the land between
himself and what he had begun to suspect was the true river-bank. But he
was too late; the squatter had been there before him and already
completed the purchase; so that as the water sank back into the river-bed
and the billabongs gradually dried up, the “cocky” found himself obliged
to beg the same boon for himself as he had refused to his neighbour,
which—as the squatter was a man, and not an archangel—was promptly and
consistently refused, till there was no choice left for the interloper
but to move on elsewhere.
In those days the “cockies” pegged out their claims and took the land for
themselves; nowadays the Land Board takes it for them—not a bit here and
there, as they did, but large areas of the very best part of the
run—sometimes even the entire estate.
How deliciously Robert Louis Stevenson writes in his book “Travels with a
Donkey,” of the delights of sleeping out of doors! I wish he could have
spent even one such night in the Australian Bush.
There was a round pool, deep among the trees in one forest that I know
of, and there at dusk the drama of the night—which is really the woodland
day—used to begin with the ibis, that came each evening to bathe. I used
to go into the wood and sit down under the trees just to watch and wait
for them. Punctually, just as the sky changed from blue to pink and
grey, they used to arrive—from some mysterious world of shades, I
veritably believe—and, floating down silently from above the tree-trunks,
step delicately into the water. It is lovely to see them fly; their
necks arch back like the handle of some Ionic vase, purely Greek, though
as they alight and stand in the water they are completely Egyptian in
form, and with all the mystery of Egypt in their mien. They do not
splash and flutter their wings in bathing, as other birds do, but, when
they move at all, do so very slowly, lifting first one foot, then
another, high out of the water; while they stare persistently, without
the faintest trace of alarm at any intruder. All the other animals here
are the remnant of the true wild, left far behind by the ages, uneasy,
wistful, and half ashamed. But the ibis is the spirit of a civilization
older than any other; and if it does not speak, it is only that it has
learnt how futile are all words.
One very hot night I took a blanket with me and camped out beside that
pool. But I did not sleep, simply because everyone else seemed awake,
and all the time things were happening. The lories sat up far later than
they ought to have done, chatting among themselves. Then, as the ibis
all floated away over the tree-tops once more, a white sulphur-crested
cockatoo came down to bathe with a most prodigious splashing and fuss.
After this the forest rested tranquil for a little while. Rolling myself
tightly up in my blanket, I turned on my side and laid my cheek against
the earth, mossy and sweet-scented, sweeping aside with my hand all the
little nobbly gum-seeds. Away back in the scrub a lyre-bird gave a
hoarse, angry cry—on one never-to-be-forgotten day in that same spot I
had seen one of these shyest of all the denizens of the forest, with his
lovely tail spread, treading arrogantly with his great feet across the
very moss where I lay—then there was another spell of silence, broken
only by the whispering of the leaves and an odd little complaining sound,
where, high up above my head, a dead bough had fallen across another and
sawed gently backwards and forwards, with a note like that of a ’cello.
A tree fell in the distance, with no tearing shriek of perturbation, but
with a resounding crash, which told me that its death had come to it,
perhaps months before, and that only now were its neighbours letting it
slip from their supporting arms to the earth, where unnumbered seedlings
would, in a few weeks, spring to life over and around it. Another
silence—during which I lay and watched the moon climb up over the
tree-tops, the way the ibis had come—and then a harsh, guttural complaint
broke on my ears from just above my head. “Ug-g-g-, ug-ug, ug—?” It was
an opossum just awaking from his cosy sleep. I could almost see him
shake himself and snap his little sharp white teeth. “Ug-ug, ug,” he
seemed to say. “What a nuisance! Another day’s work all to start over
again! tut, tut!” Then a little pouched mouse hopped airily out into the
moonlight right under my very nose; sat upright, stroked his whiskers
thoughtfully, and started off, on what cannibal orgy I almost trembled to
think, remembering Mr. Hall’s story of how fifty of these bloodthirsty
beings were sent to the University—were sent, I say, for but two
arrived—with a little heap of skin and fur to tell the tale; while, in
the very bottle in which they were put to be chloroformed, the survivors
indulged in a mortal combat. There are other tiny pouched mice in parts
of the State which jump like kangaroos, but that night I was not in range
of them; and this one cannibal creature was the only one of his kind that
I saw.
By the time the mouse had passed, literally brushing by me in search of a
more sizeable prey, the owls had started, and the doleful cry of “More
pork, more-pork!” echoed from tree to tree. More opossums began to stir,
leaping and scolding among the boughs, while all the undergrowth seemed
alive with the oddest rustlings and little whimpering cries. Of a truth
night in the forest holds an infinitude of wonder and delight, but little
enough of sleep, unless you are so inured to it as to cease to start and
wonder at every sound. Once there were Titanic marsupials as large as a
rhinoceros, and phalanges monstrous as any polar bear, and giant
kangaroos a dozen feet high, and a wombat as great as an ox, in these
very woods, away back in what I believe is called the Eocene Age—and what
must the stir and turmoil of such a night have been in those days, when
all these small people make such a bustle now from dark to dawn!
The mammals in Australia are divided into two groups, to one of which—the
egg-laying mammals, or prototheria—only two specimens belong, all the
rest coming under the other section, the theria. The platypus and the
spiny ant-eater, which comprise the first group, are—to the superficial
eye—as different as any two animals can well be, the anteater not being
unlike a slender light-coloured English hedgehog in appearance, and
covered with similar prickles, while the platypus is covered with the
softest and closest of brown fur. I have a little toque made of
platypus—in defiance of all law, for, rightly enough, the weird little
animal is most strictly protected—which has often been taken for a very
close, fine sealskin. The platypus has a wide bill, like a duck, and
webbed front feet; but its hind-feet have claws on them, rather like an
otter, while it lays eggs and suckles its young, and does everything else
by means of which it is possible to puzzle the zoologist. It is an
intensely shy creature, and, living in the burrow by the river’s edge, as
it does, is as much at home in the water as on land, and very difficult
indeed to catch a glimpse of.
Once I numbered among my friends a very likeable vagabond, who for years
earned a sufficiency of food by selling the eels he caught in a bend of
the River Yarra, about three miles above Melbourne. He had no roof over
his head, excepting the trees, or perhaps an empty cattle-shed in the
wettest weather, and he possessed neither wife nor children nor domestic
impedimenta of any sort, nor any wardrobe—except what he carried on his
back—while he was so frankly idle—apart from his occasional and leisurely
occupation of letting down eel-lines—that at the last census he wittily
suggested he should be described as a gentleman. This man told me—and I
believed him, for he had nothing to gain by lying—that he had seen a
platypus in that very bend of the river; but, though I crept out evening
after evening and watched untiringly in the same place, I never met with
the same luck; perhaps because I had not, like him, such fine “estates in
time,” as Charles Lamb would put it.
The “native-companions” are among the strangest sights of the Australian
Bush, and if you are lucky enough to see them dancing out in the open on
a fine moonlight night, you will not be likely to forget the sight. I do
not know if they are a species of crane, but they are certainly very like
them in appearance—tall and slim, and of a delicate grey colour; while if
some forerunner of Mr. Turveydrop’s was responsible for their mien and
deportment, he might well be proud of his pupils. They do not play about
at random as some animals do, apparently intoxicated by the night air and
the moonlight, but they literally dance; with a decorum and grace which
belong, in truth, to the days of the dandies. Picture, if you can, an
open stretch of country, moonlit and veiled in light mist; the white,
ghostlike trees, and these shadowy figures stepping so lightly, bowing
and bending with such solemn grace; twisting and turning in a maze of
intricate figures, seemingly governed by some unbreakable law of
etiquette, like ghosts from bygone ballrooms.
All the Australian birds, however, seem to me extraordinarily different
from the English birds in character and expression, as well as plumage
and note. They are less simple, or guileless, if one may use such a
word. They are wild with the sort of wildness that gives one the idea
that they are the imprisoned souls of wood-fawns and satyrs, older and
wiser than any other birds, with an odd sort of cunning in their aspect.
I have watched them again and again beside the pool of which I speak,
which seems, indeed, a veritable show-ground for them. There the
mud-larks, rather like our water-wagtails, only much larger, come there
with the most wanton flutter of broad black and white tails, to disport
themselves upon the patch of green at its verge. And the laughing
jackass and cockatoo, wild-duck, and even an occasional wild-swan; lories
and galahs, and innumerable little green and grey birds; owls and hawks,
the blue goshawk, and the rare white hawk.
But these are not all the strange characters to be found in the book of
Nature, which lies open before us in the Australian Bush—a book of
fantastic contradictions, of Rabelaistique twists and turns, and of the
oddest humours. There is the flying squirrel—which does not fly, and is
not a squirrel at all,—with a long fold of skin stretching from the front
to the back leg at either side, enabling its possessor to glide through
the air for a considerable distance, though always from a greater to a
lesser height. And there are kangaroos—though not in Victoria—which
climb the trees and browse on the top of the highest eucalypti; and birds
which hatch their eggs, after the manner of reptiles, in the warm sand or
gravel; and there are so-called legless lizards, peculiar to Australia,
and the water-holding frog found in the central deserts, which can blow
its body out with a sufficiency of fluid to support it for a year or more
in a dried-up mudhole—completely independent of any “Wowser.” And there
is a fish with a lung, and in Gippsland an earthworm 7 feet long, and the
thickness of a man’s finger—fit bait for the leviathan, indeed.
There are now in Victoria 4,016,995 acres of state forests and timber
reserves, apart from the other tracts of forest land, and this in spite
of the fact that ever since the white man put his foot in the state he
has been, year in, year out, stubbling up and cutting down, burning, and
ring-barking. Once up in the woods above Macedon I remember coming
across a tiny two-roomed cottage in the heart of the forest. For the
distance of a hundred feet or so the ground had been cleared at either
side, save for ragged stumps, while all around tall trees stood in thick
ranks, like the straight white pillars of a cathedral, in the middle of
which the tiny homestead appeared like an altar, with the curl of blue
smoke uprising from its chimney as incense; the only tree quite near,
and, indeed, towering over it, being one gigantic gum, on which, even as
I lingered there, the men were busied with their hatchets; and I remember
it seemed to my mind an incredible piece of vandalism that such a
beautiful tree should be destroyed, the one possible shade that the
little house could hope for through the blazing summer day; more
particularly as there were miles upon miles of forest all round if they
needed wood.
I stood and watched the men at work till they had chopped all round the
tree, leaving only a slender spindle of wood in the centre, when, by the
help of ropes which they had already fastened to it, it was dragging,
crashing, to the ground. It hurts me horribly to see a great tree fall,
for it seems to tear the very heart out of one with its last rending cry.
Something in my throat chokes me, and my eyes grow misty. To see a tree
fall, or a mighty ship launched, both overpower one with the same intense
excitement. Birth or death—they are much the same in their first
breath—joy or sorrow, they tear you alike.
A woman, one of those flat-chested, neutral-tinted women one sees in
country districts, came out of the cottage and stared sombrely at the
fallen giant, while the two men—her husband and grownup son, as I
afterwards found—walked round it, lopping off a bough here and there. I
went up and asked her for a glass of water, impelled more by curiosity
than thirst; then, as I sat on the oozing trunk and drank it, I asked her
why the tree had been cut down. Surely they would miss it when the
summer came, for the shadows of the other trees would not reach to the
house.
“Well, it ain’t always summer, you see,” said the woman, and she looked
at the tree with a sort of sickened dislike on her dull face. “It wur a
deal too near to be pleasant. Night after night I laid awake in the
winter when the wind wur blowin’ and ’eard it moanin’ an’ cryin’ out,
thinkin’ it ’ud crash down on us one o’ these nights. And where ’ud us
be then?”
I gave a little shudder. “I never thought of that,” I said. “And it is
horribly big.”
“Big! Yer right there! Ah! when I wur lyin’ in bed thur a’ nights with
the wind blowin’ across it and across us, it seemed like as it growed
bigger an’ bigger, an’ we growed littler an’ littler. Why, I mind when
my Jim there wur born—” and she jerked her thumb in the direction of the
younger man.
“Why, was he born here? and with that tree—”
“Yes—twenty years ago, come next July. Awful the weather was, I mind;
snow an’ rain an’ wind—the wind fair terrible, an’ that tree a-shriekin’
an’ moaning. There weren’t no doctor anywhere in reach, and there
weren’t no nuss; my man ’ee did all ’ee could fur me. But, Lord bless
you, miss, when I were in my pains it seemed as if I wur a-bein’ torn up
by the roots, the same as that there tree was, an’ I didn’t rightly know
which wur goin’ ter end me fust. My man, ’ee promised ’e’d ’ave it down
first thing when the weather cleared. But thur was allus a powerful lot
to do, an’ it got put off an’ put off; though I wur never not to say easy
about it fur one minute o’ time. Allus afraid, then, that it ’ud fall on
the kid an’ kill ’im. An’ the higher an’ heavier it got, the worse it
seemed, fur them gum-tree roots don’t run not no depth ter speak of. But
there it stayed, till only this very mornin’ the boss said as ’ow ’e an’
Jim ’ud ’ave it down. An’ thur it be, but I reckon as ’ow I’ll never
quit dreamin’ on it. All my folk were woodcutters, an’ my feyther wur
killed by a fallin’ tree, just the dead spit of this one.”
It was a bald enough narrative, rendered all the balder from the
sing-song, drawling voice in which it was recounted; but I have never
forgotten it. The long, uneventful years there in the clearing, more
than twenty years from the time that the drab-faced woman arrived there
as a fresh young bride; the fear and fascination of the tree gathering to
an obsession during those long nine months before her child was born—with
no nurse or doctor to stay her fears. Then that awful night, when she
did not know rightly whether it was her or the tree that was to be torn
up by the roots; the twenty years of busy days, when doubtless it seemed
less terrible, and when her husband was too hard-worked to bother about
it; and the twenty years and more of nights when it had seemed to tower
over the tiny house like some wild beast; tugging at a too slender chain,
which some night would—and must—give way, leaving it free to spring; the
only rest possible being when the wind was blowing steadily in the other
direction. And, above all, the man who had the strength and the
knowledge to rid her once for ever of such torment sleeping heavily night
after night by her side.
Still, it is not only women who are tormented by such fears. Men have
spoken of having been possessed by a horror of the loneliness of the Bush
that has half driven them mad, while a Sister in one of the large
Melbourne hospitals told me that they had far more cases of nervous
breakdown among men than among women, particularly from the effects of
isolation and loneliness; perhaps because, on the whole, a woman’s day is
more filled up with a succession of trifling duties, so varied in
themselves that she has but little time to brood. Curiously
enough—though the number of male and female lunatics in Victoria is very
nearly equal—the number of women who had committed suicide during the
year before the latest statistics were compiled is less than a third of
that of the men; while I honestly believe that any man who had been
obsessed by fear during all those years, as was the woodcutter’s wife,
and yet was unable to remove the cause of it, would have put an end to
himself.
About a couple of hours’ journey from Melbourne, and within a short drive
from Haelesville, there is a Blacks’ Settlement, where there is gathered
together a remnant of those people who, with their four-footed fellows,
were once in undisputed possession of these mountains and forests—before
the days of the axe and saw, the “stump-jump,” and the “mallee roller.”
It is a good many years since I was at Coranderrk, as the settlement is
named, and therefore I have no very clear memories of it, excepting that
the people all seemed exceedingly leisurely and good tempered, and
childishly clamorous for pennies. Two or three men emulated each other
in throwing the boomerang for our amusement, and in this the older men
were certainly by far the best, literally bursting with pride at their
achievements; one grey-haired man, taller and bigger-built than his
fellows, sending it to such a height and distance that it had dwindled to
a hardly distinguishable speck against the blue sky before it turned and
came whistling back, in a sweeping semicircle, to drop almost exactly at
the place where its owner stood.
The little huts at Coranderrk are tidy and comfortable, and the people
well fed and cared for; but there is something inexpressibly sad about
the whole encampment. It is bad enough to see one person dying—say of
consumption, or some such fatal disease—but it is worse by far to see a
whole people die, no matter how ineffectual they may be in their powers
of grappling with the conditions of modern life, for those individuals
who are not actually dead are yet in a state of senile decay, and, having
lost the wonderful instincts of a savage, are still groping wistfully and
ignorantly among the intricate ways of civilization. Still, sometimes if
you can borrow a black fellow, to go fishing or trapping with, you may
yet catch sight of a spark of the old bushman’s cunning and mysterious
lore.
Altogether there are in Victoria seven mission-stations and depôts for
aborigines, the number they house being in all only a little over 260.
Besides this, there are still a few wandering black fellows, who are
given food and clothing when they call at the mission-stations, but they
are very few in number, many of them being but half-castes, the total
number of the pure-blooded blacks, in 1901, being estimated at only 271,
with 381 of mixed blood. {298}
Once, when I was staying up in New South Wales, a little old black
fellow, apparently a most genial person, was pointed out to me, who had
married a white woman. After a while she had grown tired of the union
and forsaken her Othello, on which he brought her back, with the aid of a
club, and, finding her still restless, broke one of her legs. Directly
the bone had set she ran—or rather hobbled, with the help of a stick—away
again; on which he brought her back once more, and broke both her legs,
to make sure of her. After this—or so I was told—they remained a most
happy and peaceable couple, while, though she was still lame, she was
quite sufficiently recovered to limp about the _mia-mia_ and attend
adequately to her lord’s wants, which, after all, were not much more
numerous than those of old Omar—less, indeed, by the book of verse, for
which might be substituted a pipe. Who can say now that, tactfully
managed, mixed marriages are not a success?
The lower a man is in the scale of nature, the more compensations he
seems to possess. If the brain and reasoning powers are imperfectly
developed, the sense of smell, of touch, of hearing, and of sight is
intensified. As his brain becomes more mature, he learns a better way to
catch and kill his prey than by chasing it on foot, and therefore loses
his swiftness. His teeth and jaws become weaker because he can cook his
food before eating it. He loses his sense of time because he has clocks
and bells to tell it to him; and his instinct for locality, because he
has grown to depend on a compass, roads, or signposts. In all matters
connected with hunting the aboriginal, in the hard school of necessity,
has brought his powers of observation to a fine point that is little
short of marvellous to us, who have grown to depend on books for the
greater part of all we wish to know. To go to the public library, look
through the catalogue, and hunt up the best book on any subject we wish
to master; to stuff ourselves up with some special information, so that
we may wriggle our way through an examination. It is all very different
from the years of patience and endurance that a black fellow brings to
the accomplishment of any special task, the mastering of any peculiar
knowledge. With the passing of the Australian aboriginal will pass also
a minute and intimate knowledge of animal life and habits that no
European zoologist can ever touch, and of which the average sportsman,
with all his improved appliances for transit and slaughter, has no idea.
He will watch a laughing-jackass for hours so that he may track and kill
a snake. He will know in what hollow stump an opossum may be lurking,
simply by the movements of the flies which are hovering near. He will
slip silently into a pool, or billabong, and, diving under the water,
seize a duck and break its neck beneath the surface, so noiselessly that
none of its companions swimming around it will be disturbed, and so will
kill one after another until he has enough; while, when he wishes to
decoy pelicans, he will throw stones into the water in such a manner as
to give the precise effect of a fish rising. He knows—with an almost
unerring knowledge—from which direction the wind may be expected to blow
during the night, and so makes his little shelter of boughs on the side
from which it will come; while the opening of his camp is always away
from it, with the fire in front; and he is the most expert water-finder
in the world, knowing at a glance, by the way vegetation grows, where
water will be found, and at what a depth, and in what places and where,
after a heavy dew, he may be able to collect enough to fill his
water-bag, or the shell or skull, with the orifice sealed up, which
serves the same purpose; collecting, even in the heart of the desert,
where any white man would die of thirst, a sufficiency of water from the
long tap-root of the gum-scrub. He knows how to throw the boomerang so
as never to miss; how to carve the returning one—short and flat, with a
curious twist on its own axis—which is used mainly in trick-throwing or
among large flocks of birds, and the long heavy one, which does not
return, and is used in all serious hunting; how also to make, and use in
the chase and fight, two-handled wooden swords, and clubs, and shields,
sometimes beautifully carved, though with handles that are for the most
part too small for a European hand.
[Picture: An aboriginal climbing a tree]
The black man’s razor is a bivalved, sharp-edged shell, rather like a
mussel, with which he tweaks out the hairs—a most painful proceeding, I
should imagine. Needles and awls he makes from the leg-bones of the
kangaroo, and nets and bags for hunting from the tendons of the larger
animals; while he grinds his corn, as does the Indian, between two large
stones, the lower one being very slightly hollowed out, and the
upper—about the size of a man’s fist—rounded, and usually of a harder
kind, a good nether-stone being often carried for many miles.
All fighting laws among the aborigines are as ceremonious and well
arranged as those of any medieval tourney, while the marriage laws are
exceedingly stringent. A man may not marry a woman of his own family
name, which is usually that of some plant or animal, while tribes in some
districts are carefully divided into two “phraties,” to guard against
possible intermarriage, each half possessing a different “kobong.”
Neither will he, except under pressure of the direst necessity, kill an
animal that bears that name, for it is his “kobong,” and so sacred to him
that, even if he is starving, he will not touch it while it is asleep,
but gives it every possible chance of escape.
Some people believe that the black fellow has no religion. This, I
really believe, is chiefly owing to the general tendency to so name only
our own particular belief, lumping all the others together under the name
of “superstition.” “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is another man’s
doxy,” as Bishop Warburton once said. Mr. Ramsey Smith, head of the
South Australian Department of Public Health, declares the Australian
native to be saturated with religion, and, truly, if we would comprehend
anything of a people’s beliefs, we must know everything that there is to
be known of themselves, their surroundings, and their lives. There is a
spiritual religion which strives for purity and goodness for its own sake
alone. But most religions, including that of the ancient Jews, have been
mainly based on a fear of consequences, which governs alike both civil
and personal character. The laws of the black fellow—in spite of the
name he has for being at once dirty, primitive, and debased—are,
particularly in dealing with all matters of sanitation, even more
stringent than those of the Jew, and though the reason he will give you
for destroying every scrap that remains over from any animal he has eaten
will be that—if an enemy should get hold of it, he would cause him
serious injury, or even loss of life; still, in all probability, it was
the law of cleanliness which first gave rise to such a belief.
The black fellow’s Bible is his stock of fables, repeated from mouth to
mouth, as were the tales of Homer. Most of these legends enforce some
lesson or moral, though how much of the actual tales themselves is
believed, and how much is recognized as being old wives’ fables,
especially concocted to point a moral, it would be hard to say. But this
we do know: that the black fellow’s gods are numerous, consisting alike
of good and bad spirits, round which are hung legends of the Deluge; of
the manner in which the sky is supported; of the origin of the sun—which
is a woman—and the moon—which is a man—and why they wax and wane; of the
meaning of comets, stars, and eclipses; while his entire moral code is
embodied in a series of elaborate laws and ceremonies in connection with
phratries and totems, child betrothal, infanticide, and marriage,—in
connection with which the laws are extraordinarily strict—corroborees and
initiation, from which last ceremony all the women of the tribe are
warned away—under the penalty of death—by the “bullroarer,” or “bummer.”
Mr. Rowland, in his book “The New Nation,” tells an amazing story, which
I cannot resist repeating here, from the simple fact that it shows so
plainly the way that the wits of the black fellows are, in some cases,
more than equally balanced against those of the white. In the time of
Governor Arthur a drive of natives was attempted, so that they might be
separated from the white populace in camps under close supervision, and
the constant evils of massacre and outrage between the two races be put
an end to. Some 2,000 soldiers, convicts, and settlers were engaged for
the task, and a cordon was slowly drawn, in the toils of which it was
implicitly believed that every single native in the district must of
necessity be confined. Some £30,000 were spent over this human net, with
the idea that, once drawn, all the troubles with the natives would be for
ever at an end. At last, after many days, the sides of the vast
semicircle closed one upon another, and amid the breathless excitement of
the entire colony the catch was counted—one boy and one man, at £15,000 a
head.
It is odd, in the face of the strenuous All-White Australian policy of
to-day, to find that at one time—in South Australia, at least—there was
an idea that all the difficulties between the blacks and whites could be
settled by intermarriage—an idea even then, I should imagine, held only
by the minority, though, unfortunately, they happened in this instance to
be representatives of the Crown—and a regulation was actually passed by
which any white man marrying a lubra got a grant of ten acres of
otherwise free ground. Just about as much as a lubra could work, I
suppose they thought. Nowadays marriage with the blacks is not even
thought of—much less provided for—though any tampering with a black woman
on the part of a white is regarded as a criminal offence, and is
punishable by imprisonment; while the sooner all lubras in the Northern
Territory are separated into strictly guarded native settlements, the
better, judging from appalling medical reports which occasionally reach
the public ear.
In Victoria nowadays the black fellows are few, and ravaged by the
diseases which the white man has brought to them, and by smallpox and
consumption. But in Queensland and the Northern Territory they are more
numerous, more virile, and more like their old selves, and therefore it
is to the people who have known them in these places that we must turn to
satisfy any curiosity or human interest that we may feel; for humanity to
Mrs. Æneas Gunn’s beautiful and sympathetic books, “The Little Black
Princess” and “The Never, Never Land,” and for more exact and scientific
knowledge to Professor Gregory’s book, “The Dead Heart of Australia,”
among many others.
Nowadays one may live among the Victorian forests and never even see a
black fellow, but the names that he has given mountain, district, and
river still remain, like a mocking echo of his voice. The Barambogie,
the Buckrabanyule, the Barramboot, the Bulla-Bulla, the Keil-warra, the
Koorooyugh among the mountains; the Benambra Creek, the Marraboor, the
Kororoit, the Kiewa, the Toonginbooka, and the Wonnangatta among the
rivers; the Durdidwarrah, the Corangamite, the Koreetnung, and the
Turang-moroke among the lakes, being a few of the soft-syllabled words
which rise at random to my mind as I write, while from river bank,
mountain, and forest, that the Black Fellow has thus christened, out of
the tangled scrub and down from the tall gum-trees, peer the bright-eyed
wistful Bush beasts, as if wondering why the world has so changed,
leaving them there still unaltered, the very flotsam of time.
Even now, by good fortune, we may still come across the remains of some
of the forest sanctuaries of the aborigines, breaking through the wall of
forest trees which surrounds them, and stepping into their silent places
with a sudden sense of intensest pity for a dying race, and awe and
reverence for a life and faith of which we can have no true conception.
In some parts of Australia, more particularly in Northern Queensland,
these are to be found, in the very heart of the Bush—surrounded by high
walls, of dense forest growth—curious circular clearings, too completely
denuded of undergrowth and too symmetrical in shape to be for one moment
regarded as merely accidental. These are the ancient “bora,” or
“corroboree,” grounds of the aborigines, formed, for the most part, long
before Captain Cook—or any other white man—set foot in the continent,
though to this day the remnants of the dying race meet there periodically
to conduct their most important ceremonies and hold their most solemn
parliaments—or, to use a more precise word, conclaves, for mere speech
occupies a far more restrained and less important place in such meetings
than it does in the political discussions of the whites. These clearings
have been in existence for so long that even the very oldest among the
aboriginals has never even heard of their beginnings; and though
apparently they can always be easily located, no regular cut track is
found to lead to them. To this day they are kept absolutely clear, save
in an instance where all those people whose sanctuaries they represent
have died out or been hopelessly scattered—and it is another example of
the resourcefulness and industry of the black fellow—when any of his
cherished beliefs are at stake—that he should have been able so
successfully to grapple with all the quick-springing mass of undergrowth
which leaps to life, almost in a night, in such places.
What mysterious ceremonies, what awful initiations, have been performed
in these “bora” it needs an authority on such things to say. But surely
there were never such sanctuaries apart from the sacred groves of Greece,
never such temples built by hand, provocative at once of such peace and
such reverence—silent, open places of the illimitable forests, carpeted
over by the native grasses, which will only grow where the clear light of
the sun can penetrate—fit emblem, indeed, of all the virtues.
* * * * *
* * * * *
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
NOTES.
{232} In Europe the density of the population, or number of persons to
the square mile, is 112.58; in Australia it is 147.
{298} At the first colonization of Victoria, the number of blacks was
estimated to amount to 15,000.