The construction of the great Australian trans-continental railway line was the end of the native groups north, east and west for many hundreds of miles.

For some years, stray natives had been coming in to civilization, following the tracks of the explorers, Warburton, Giles, Forrest and Maurice. They had looked upon the white men with awe-bearded ghosts with a fire magic that could send little stones into their vitals. “Windinjirri! Run! Run! Run!” they shouted when they beheld those fearsome spirit monsters, the camels, and scattered to the four winds, dropping infants and food in their desperate fright. Windinjirri was the camel’s name among them ever after. One woman gave birth to a baby while fleeing from the camels, and no harm resulting, the baby was given the camel as its totem.

At first they lived in abject fear of the “waijela” as they learned to call the white man, but after they had talked with him, touched him, and even eaten his food, the fear changed to anger. This waijela was killing their meat, leaving the bodies of the kangaroos to rot and taking only the skins. He was monopolizing the precious water-holes for the hated camel, forbidding the rightful owners to approach. Then, little by little, or rapidly, according to local circumstance, he assumed another, and though they did not know it, more terrifying aspect. He became a source of revenue to them, and he had come to stay. They were always familiar with the traffic in women. That the waijela knew the trade simplified matters.

So with the survey of the east-west railway began the extermination of the central native groups, not by the deliberate cruelty of the white man, but by the impossibility of amalgamating two such extreme races, Palaeolithic and 20th Century, and through the natives’ ready, and even eager, adoption of the white man’s vices.

As the construction proceeded, with a great influx of railway workers of all classes and nationalities, along 1,000 miles of previously uninhabited country, they straggled in to the line in increasing numbers, drawn by the abundance of food-stuffs and the new fire-drink [Kala-gabbi] that made them “head no good.” [Kooramba] Each group through whose territory the line was passing saw its waters used up, the trees and bushes destroyed for firewood and fence-posts, and the whole country turned to strange uses. In their eagerness to “make the most of what they yet may spend,” they did not know that they were bringing about their own annihilation. They thought that the train and its people would go away, and leave them the things to play with.

Bush rumours travelled far and rumours magnify. From over a thousand miles north and north-east and north-west the groups came, amalgamating with the tribes they met, or killing, on the way; smokes on the horizon telling of their coming as they skirted the Plain, still afraid to cross it for fear of the serpent devil. Eastward to Wynbring and Tarcoola, westward to Karonie and Kalgoorlie, they journeyed, but more frequently to the traditional camping-ground on the north-north-eastern rim of Nullarbor, known to the white man as the Ooldea Soak.

This is the legend of Ooldea Water.

Along, long time ago in dhoogoor times, Karrbiji, a little marsupial, came from the west carrying a skin-bag of water on his back, and as he travelled east and east there was no water anywhere, and Karrbiji said, “I will put water in the ground so that the men can have good water always.” He came to a shallow place like a dried lake. He went into the middle of it, and was just going to empty his water-bag when he heard someone whistling, and presently he saw Ngabbula, the spike-backed lizard, coming threateningly towards him, whistling. As he watched Ngabbula coming along, Karrbiji was very frightened, and he said, “I can only leave a little water here. I shall call this place ‘Yooldil–Beena’— the swamp where I stood to pour out the water,” and he tried to hide the water from Ngabbula by covering it with sand, but Ngabbula came along quickly and Karrbiji took up his skin-bag and ran and ran because Ngabbula would take all his water from him.

By and by he had run quite away from Ngabbula, and soon he came to a deep sandy hollow among high hills, and he said, “This is a good place, I can hide all the water here, and Ngabbula won’t be able to find it. He can’t smell water.”

Karrbiji went down into the hollow and emptied all the water out of his bag into the sand. He covered up the water so that it could not be seen, and he said, “This is Yooldil Gabbi and I shall sit beside this water and watch my friends finding it and drinking it.” Karrbiji was feeling very glad that he had put the water in such a safe place. All at once he again heard loud whistling and he looked and saw Ngabbula coming along towards him. Karrbiji was very frightened of Ngabbula, and he quickly picked up his empty skin-bag and ran away; but fast as he ran Ngabbula ran faster.

Now, Giniga, the native cat, and Kallaia, the emu, were great friends of Karrbiji, and they had watched him putting the water under the sand where they could easily scratch for it and drink cool nice water always, and they said, “We must not let Ngabbula kill our friend,” and when Ngabbula chased Karrbiji, Kallaia and Giniga chased Ngabbula, and Ngabbula threw his spears at Giniga and made white spots all over Giniga where the spears had hit him. Giniga hit Ngabbula on the head with his club and now all Ngabbula’s heads are flat, because of the great hit that Giniga had given Ngabbula.

Then they ran on again and Ngabbula began to get frightened and he stopped chasing Karrbiji, but Kallaia and Giniga said, “We must kill Ngabbula, and so stop him from killing Karrbiji,” and a long long way north they came up to Ngabbula, and Kallaia, the emu, speared him, and he died.

Then they went to Karrbiji’s place, and Kallaia, Giniga and Karrbiji made a corroboree, and Beera, the moon, played with them, and by and by he took them up into the sky where they are now kattang-ga (“heads” stars). Karrbiji sat down beside his northern water, and when men came to drink of his water Karrbiji made them his friends and they said, “Karrbiji is our dreamtime totem,” and all the men who lived beside that water were Karrbiji totem men. They made a stone emblem of Karrbiji and they put it in hiding near the water, and no woman has ever walked near the place where the stone emblem sits down. Kallaia, the emu, “sat down” beside Yooldil Water, and when the first men came there they saw Kallaia scraping the sand for the water, and they said “Kallaia shall be our totem. This is his water, but he has shown us how to get it.” Giniga, the native cat, went between the two great waters, Karrbiji’s Water and Kallaia’s Water, and was always the friend of both. Ngabbula was killed north of Yooldil Gabbi, but he also had his water, and men came there and made him their totem, but Kallaia totem men always fought with Ngabbula totem men and killed them and ate them.

Karrbiji, after his work was done, went north, and “sat down” among the Mardudharra Wong-ga (wonga-ga-speech, talk), not far from the Arrunda, beside his friends Giniga, the native cat, and Kallaia, the emu. And he made plenty of water come to the Mardudharra men, and by and by the men said, “Karrbiji has brought his good water to us all. We will be brothers of Karrbiji.” In a sacred spot near the water where Karrbiji sat down, there is a stone Karrbiji (phallic emblem) and here all the Karrbiji totem men gathered at certain times, and performed sacred and secret ceremonies to Karrbiji, the water-bringer.

The Kallaia men of Yooldil Gabbi (Ooldea Water) are now all dead and the last emu man died far, far away from his water. Jinjabulla was his name, and he was very old and blind when he died.

Ngoora-bil-nga and his brothers, the last Karrbiji totem men, left their ancestral waters and reached Ooldea Water in 1928. They knew Yooldil Gabbi from the Karrbiji legend only. They left the Karrbiji emblem in its old place; but they must never again dance the Karrbiji corroboree, or “fire would come inside them, and burn their hearts out.”

Nothing more than one of the many depressions in the never-ending sandhills that run waveringly from the Bight for nearly a thousand miles, Ooldea Water is one of Nature’s miracles in barren Central Australia. No white man coming to this place would ever guess that that dreary hollow with the sand blowing across it was an unfailing fountain, yet a mere scratch and the magic waters welled in sight. Even in the cruellest droughts, it had never failed. Here the tribes gathered in their hundreds for initiation and other ceremonies. When all the waters had dried for countless miles, strangers came from afar, offering their flints and their food and their women for the right to share it and live. The emu men of Ooldea had lived and thrived on the renown of their water, watching daily for the light smokes that prepared them for the visit of friends or the heavy smokes that signalled the approach of an initiation party. On the steep hills about the soak, the visiting mobs camped, each in the direction of his own ground. Exchange of totem foods made for friendship-mallee-hen, emu and native cat-and there was always plenty of vegetable and meat food and edible grubs and sweet grasses. Today, in a flintless country cut flints in millions are to be found on the surrounding sandhills and about the site of the native wells, and human bones and skulls are evidence of these great gatherings of long ago.

In the building of the transcontinental line, the water of Ooldea passed out of its own people’s hand for ever. Pipelines and pumping plants reduced it at the rate of 10,000 gallons a day for locomotives. The natives were forbidden the soak, and permitted to obtain their water only from taps at the siding. In a few years the engineering plant apparently perforated the blue clay bed, twenty feet below surface. Ooldea, already an orphan water, was a thing of the past. Old blind Jinjabulla, the last of its emu men, whom I had tended at my Weerilya camp 100 miles south, was burned to death shortly after I left, in his shelter at Fowler’s Bay.

When I came to Ooldea Siding in September, 1919, I found conditions difficult. Some hundreds of derelict natives had established their camps at the sidings, and travelled up and down the line, begging from the train at every stopping-place, a responsibility and a menace in that many of them were already ravaged by disease. There was no control of them. The few filthy rags they wore had been thrown to them in charity and decency. A policeman stationed at Tarcoola and another at Kalgoorlie dispensed rations, but Tarcoola and Kalgoorlie are nearly a thousand miles apart.

The newly formed railway settlements had not yet settled down after the chaos of the very recent construction. After-math of war was still in the air, and the unrest among the white communities was almost as distressing as the obvious degeneration of the black. I pitched my tent first on the south side of the line, where there was a small auxiliary railway for carting wood and a pipe-line, and a half-cast teamster camped with a motley crowd of natives. Such a diversity of creatures they were that, among remnants of all the south and central areas, and the east and west, I found an Arunta of the MacDonnell Ranges, a Dieri of Cooper’s Creek, and even a Bibbulmun woman from Ravensthorpe in South–West Australia, the wife of this German half-cast, an unhappy creature, who had drifted with him through all the groups between.

Numbers of white derelicts and camp-followers were still on the line, strike-agitators, foreigners, pilgrims of one kind and another, “jumping the rattler” between the capitals, or recklessly walking the whole thousand miles, throwing themselves on the hospitality of each succeeding camp of fettlers. Some of them cut the telegraph wires in the throes of thirst or held up the passing trains in starvation, and most of them stirred up trouble wherever they went. Prostitution of native women was rife, sought by the blacks and encouraged by the lowest whites, and many unfortunates had already reaped the wages of sin. When the first half-cast babies appeared, the wild mothers believed that they were the results of eating the white man’s food, and rubbed them frantically with charcoal to restore their black health and colour, till often they died. Even when they had eaten the fruit of the White Man’s Tree of Knowledge, they were not pleased, for they had seen piebald horses, and shared the primitive fear and distaste of the unusual.

News travels quickly by smoke signal, and soon my old Bight and Eucla and Fowler’s Bay natives were arriving to sit down with me again. An epidemic of influenza broke out, and in tending and feeding the sick, making the acquaintance of strangers of the desert, clothing them for their first entry to civilization and smoothing out many a social problem, I was labouring every hour of the day when there came the disturbing news of an engine-drivers’ strike. The six weekly express-three from the east and three from the west-were no longer to be expected, nor the weekly supply train. Moreover, there were rumours that the service would be discontinued for twelve months.

I had few stores in my modest larder for such an emergency, and no facility for obtaining them. Telegrams were useless. The strike was declared on October 30. The fettlers were paid off, and Port Augusta volunteers drove a train to take their women and children into Kalgoorlie. From these departing fettlers, I bought all the flour, tea and sugar available for my natives, and soon found myself the only white woman left on the line, alone at Ooldea save for the two pumpers at the Soak, three and a half miles north, the half-cast teamster and the various camps. Then I learned that a large gathering of natives had come in for an initiation ceremony at Tarcoola, and might be expected at any moment, but I had nothing to give them.

The next eight weeks were indeed difficult. I existed principally on porridge, and sometimes I would give that to my patients, and eke out the next day upon a meagre damper or a potato. Once I made a meal of an iguana that two friends, Nyirdain and Thangarri, caught and cooked for me. Worse than all, our water was limited. As it was no longer needed for the fettlers and the locomotives, the pumpers had ceased to work, and the daily supply had to be rationed scrupulously. I admit that I was on the verge of desperation, with no relief in sight, when there came the glad news that the strike was over. On December 3, by the first train through, I was able to purchase one loaf and a pound of butter. Never did I enjoy such a simple meal so heartily.

Following this harrowing experience, we were blessed for a time with the passing of six trains weekly, in an attempt to reduce the congestion in the railway sheds. The fettlers and their wives returned to their little homes so rudely deserted, and I was able to provide my natives with a Christmas dinner worthy of the name.

My own fare, day after day throughout the years, has always been so simple that to myself I am a miracle. I have consoled myself with the reflection that the simpler our needs, the nearer we are to the gods. A potato in the ashes, now and again a spoonful of rice that nine times out of ten was burned in my absence or absent-mindedness, occasionally the treat of a boiled egg, and always tea-my panacea for all ills-were the full extent of my culinary craft. Even so, after so many hardships, I determined that this Christmas should be a memorable one for us all, and passed the glad tidings of peace and goodwill and plenty mai along to the natives.

A big mob gathered about me in expectancy. Fires were quickly lighted and flour was given out for damper making.

“Who can make plum-pudding?”

“Injarradu pudding roongani.” So Injarradu was given mutton fat and sugar, raisins and dates and prunes and figs, eggs and flour and carbonate of soda, and baking-powder, holus-bolus in a bath-tub, and duly produced a glutinous seething mass wrapped in one of Kabbarli’s old nightdresses and boiled in a zinc bucket. After ten hours of cooking, the centre of the pudding was half-liquid, and its external appearance that of a diseased pancake, but it disappeared rapidly enough, with all the other good things. Each little family sat in such a position that it could not be overlooked by its neighbours while eating. It is an offence for a native to ............