We were camped on the edge of a billabong. Barlas was kneading a damper,
Drysdale was tenderly packing coals about the billy to make the water
boil, and I was cooking the chops. The hobbled horses were picking the
grass and the old-man salt-bush near, and Bimbi, the black boy,
was gathering twigs and bark for the fire. That is the order of
merit--Barlas, Drysdale, myself, the horses and Bimbi. Then comes the
Cadi all by himself. He is given an isolated and indolent position,
because he was our guest and also because, in a way, he represented
the Government. And though bushmen do not believe much in a far-off
Government--even though they say when protesting against a bad Land
Law, “And your Petitioners will ever Pray,” and all that kind of
yabber-yabber--they give its representative the lazy side of the fire
and a fig of the best tobacco when he bails up a camp as the Cadi did
ours. Stewart Ruttan, the Cadi, was the new magistrate at Windowie and
Gilgan, which stand for a huge section of the Carpentaria country. He
was now on his way to Gilgan to try some cases there. He was a new chum,
though he had lived in Australia for years. As Barlas said, he’d been
kept in a cultivation-paddock in Sydney and Brisbane; and he was now
going to take the business of justice out of the hands of Heaven and
its trusted agents the bushmen, and reduce the land to the peace of the
Beatitudes by the imposing reign of law and summary judgments. Barlas
had just said as much, though in different language.
I knew by the way that Barlas dropped the damper on the hot ashes and
swung round on his heel that he was in a bad temper. “And so you think,
Cadi,” said he, “that we squatters and bushmen are a strong, murderous
lot; that we hunt down the Myalls--[Aborigines]--like kangaroos or
dingoes, and unrighteously take justice in our own hands instead of
handing it over to you?”
“I think,” said the Cadi, “that individual and private revenge
should not take the place of the Courts of Law. If the blacks commit
depredations--”
“Depredations!” interjected Drysdale with sharp scorn.
“If they commit depredations and crimes,” the Cadi continued, “they
should be captured as criminals are captured elsewhere and be brought in
and tried. In that way respect would be shown to British law and--” here
he hesitated slightly, for Barlas’s face was not pleasant to see--“and
the statutes.”
But Barlas’s voice was almost compassionate as he said: “Cadi, every
man to his trade, and you’ve got yours. But you haven’t learned yet that
this isn’t Brisbane or Melbourne. You haven’t stopped to consider how
many police would be necessary for this immense area of country if you
are really to be of any use. And see here,”--his face grew grim and
dark, “you don’t know what it is to wait for the law to set things right
in this Never Never Land. There isn’t a man in the Carpentaria and Port
Darwin country but has lost a friend by the cowardly crack of a waddy
in the dead of night or a spear from behind a tree. Never any fair
fighting, but red slaughter and murder--curse their black hearts!”
Barlas gulped down what seemed very like a sob.
Drysdale and I knew how strongly Barlas felt. He had been engaged to be
married to a girl on the Daly River, and a week before the wedding she
and her mother and her two brothers were butchered by blacks whom they
had often befriended and fed. We knew what had turned Barlas’s hair grey
and spoiled his life.
Drysdale took up the strain: “Yes, Cadi, you’ve got the true missionary
gospel, the kind of yabber they fire at each other over tea and buns at
Darling Point and Toorak--all about the poor native and the bad, bad men
who don’t put peas in their guns, and do sometimes get an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.... Come here, Bimbi.” Bimbi came.
“Yes, master,” Bimbi said.
“You kill that black-fellow mother belonging to you?”
“Yes, master.”
“Yes,” Drysdale continued, “Bimbi went out with a police expedition
against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother’s head off. As a
race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty. They will track their
own brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the
whites. As a race they are treacherous and vile, though as individuals
they may have good points.”
“No, Cadi,” once more added Barlas, “we can get along very well without
your consolidated statutes or High Courts or Low Courts just yet. They
are too slow. Leave the black devils to us. You can never prove anything
against them in a court of law. We’ve tried that. Tribal punishment is
the only proper thing for individual crime. That is what the nations
practise in the islands of the South Seas. A trader or a Government
official is killed. Then a man-of-war sweeps a native village out of
existence with Hotchkiss guns. Cadi, we like you; but we say to you, Go
back to your cultivation-paddock at Brisbane, and marry a wife and beget
children before the Lord, and feed on the Government, and let us work
out our own salvation. We’ll preserve British justice and the statutes,
too. ... There, the damper, as Bimbi would say, is ‘corbon budgery’, and
your chop is done to a turn, Cadi. And now let’s talk of something that
doesn’t leave a bad taste in the mouth.”
The Cadi undoubtedly was more at home with reminiscences of nights
at the Queensland Club and moonlight picnics at lovely Humpy Bong and
champagne spreads in a Government launch than at dispensing law in
the Carpentaria district. And he had eager listeners. Drysdale’s
open-mouthed, admiring “My word!” as he puffed his pipe, his back
against an ironbark tree, was most eloquent of long banishment from the
delights of the “cultivation-paddock”; and Barlas nodded frequently his
approval, and was less grim than usual. Yet, peaceful as we were, it
might have puzzled a stranger to see that all of us were armed--armed
in this tenantless, lonely wilderness! Lonely and tenantless enough
it seemed. There was the range of the Copper-mine hills to the south,
lighted by the wan moon; and between and to the west a rough scrub
country, desolating beyond words, and where even edible snakes would
be scarce; spots of dead-finish, gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and
east, and in the trees by the billabong the cry of the cockatoo and the
laughing-jackass. It was lonely, but surely it was safe. Yes, perhaps it
was safe!
It was late when we turned in, our heads upon our saddles, for the Cadi
had been more than amusing--he had been confidential, and some political
characters were roughly overhauled for our benefit, while so-called
Society did not escape flagellation. Next morning the Cadi left us. He
gave us his camps--Bora Bora, Budgery-Gar, Wintelliga, and Gilgan--since
we were to go in his direction also soon. He turned round in his saddle
as he rode off, and said gaily: “Gentlemen, I hope you’ll always help to
uphold the majesty of the law as nobly as you have sustained its envoy
from your swags.”
Drysdale and I waved our hands to him, but Barlas muttered something
between his teeth. We had two days of cattle-hunting in the Copper-mine
hills, and then we started westward, in the tracks of the Cadi, to make
for Barlas’s station. The second day we camped at Bora Bora Creek. We
had just hobbled the horses, and were about to build a fire, when Bimbi
came running to us. “Master, master,” he said to Drysdale, “that fellow
Cadi yarraman mumkull over there. Plenty myall mandowie!”--[‘Master,
master, the Cadi’s horse is dead over there, and there are plenty of
black fellows’ tracks about.’)
We found the horse pierced with spears. The Cadi had evidently mounted
and tried to get away. And soon, by a clump of the stay-a-while bush,
we discovered, alas! the late companion of our camp-fire. He was gashed
from head to foot, and naked.
We buried him beneath a rustling sandal-tree, and on its bark carved the
words:
“Sacred to the memory of Stewart Ruttan.”
And beneath, Barlas added the following:
“The Cadi sleeps. The Law regards him not.”
In a pocket of the Cadi’s coat, which lay near, we found the picture of
a pretty girl. On it was written:
“To dearest Stewart, from Alice.”
Barlas’s face was stern and drawn. He looked at us from under his shaggy
brows.
“There’s a Court to be opened,” he said. “Do you stand for law or
justice?”
“For justice,” we replied.
Four days later in a ravine at Budgery-Gar a big camp of blacks were
feasting. With loathsome pantomime they were re-enacting the murders
they had committed within the past few days; murders of innocent white
women and children, and good men and true--among them the Cadi, God help
him! Great fires were burning in the centre of the camp, and the bodies
of the black devils writhed with hideous colour in the glare. Effigies
of murdered whites were speared and mangled with brutal cries, and then
black women of the camp were brought out, and mockeries of unnameable
horrors were performed. Hell had emptied forth its carrion.
But twelve bitter white men looked down upon this scene from the scrub
and rocks above, and their teeth were set. Barlas, their leader, turned
to them and said: “This court is open. Are you ready?”
The click of twelve rifles was the reply.
When these twelve white jurymen rode away from the ravine there was
not one but believed that justice had been done by the High Court of
Budgery-Gar.