Ooldea Siding, in full view of the trains, with many passers-by, was scarcely the place to accomplish good work for the natives, and it was not long before I transferred my camp to a sandy gully a mile north, on the track that led to the Soak, with a convenient tap in the pipe-line for water supply. There I built an enclosing breakwind of mulga bushes, and set up the little household that was to be my domain for 16 years.

There was an 8 x 10 tent for my living and sleeping, an upturned tank which my natives and I rolled many miles across the plains where it had lain stranded for years, and which I utilized as library, storing there my manuscripts and my books; a bough shed “storehouse” that held everything from my daily provender and supplies for the natives to their most sacred totem boards and initiation properties, and a smaller bough shed on the crest of the hill, with a ladder leading to its leafy roof, that was my observatory. Here in the bright, still evenings, I studied the skies, astronomy being an old love of mine, and compiled my aboriginal mythologies, many of them as poetic and beautiful as are the starry mythologies of the Greeks. A prickle-bush-“dead finish,” as old white prospectors call it-was my barred gateway at night-time, a barrier for privacy passed by few in all my years of residence. Outside, the natives would come to await my attention, old friends sitting patiently beside the pipe-line, and naked newcomers shyly flitting about among the trees, sometimes two days before they summoned courage to approach this Kabbarli of whom they had heard so far away. Innocent as children, they would make their fires on the sand-hills and camp contentedly while I made or obtained from my store the clothing they needed before they approached the siding, too soon to learn the art of scavenging and selling all that was saleable.

They came to me from the Mann, the Gosse, the Everard, the Petermann and the Musgrave Ranges, occasionally from as far away as Tanami, from Kalgoorlie and Laverton in the West and Streaky Bay in the East, and from far across the north-western borders of the State. Sometimes two years on the journey, zigzagging in the desert for food and water, they followed the tracks of those who had come in before them, disintegrating, reuniting, mourning and rejoicing, and every moon fleeing farther from their hereditary waters. At last the remnants arrived on the rim of civilization outside my breakwind. As each little group appeared, I was made aware of its arrival by the wailing and shouting and spear-rattling of the groups already there. Every native who steps over his own boundary is in strange country and hostile. There are no groups in the lower centre now, only little mobs continually changing. The amalgamation of the totems is their frantic effort to coalesce. Each mob was more reckless and difficult to control than the preceding ones.

My duty, after the first friendly overtures of tea and damper, was to set them at ease, clothe them, and simply to explain the white man’s ways and the white man’s laws.

Sometimes a group of forty and more would arrive, families and vagrants following each other, finding their way across the desert, drinking water from the tree-roots, and setting fire to the bush as they came, hunting kangaroos and emus. They had fought and killed on the way south, and their only safety from each other now lay in their proximity to the white man. His novelties were also exciting. The first few weeks of their arrival were usually spent in ejaculating “Irr! Irr! Irr!” at the trains, the houses, the white women and babies, paper, pannikins, tea, sugar and all the mystifying belongings of the “waijela.” Biscuits and cake and fruit were thrown to them from the train windows, while their boomerangs and native weapons, and their importance in the landscape as subjects for photography, brought many a shilling and sixpence for them to spend, which they promptly did, without any knowledge of its value, and sometimes were wickedly imposed upon. The train was their undoing. Amongst the hundreds that “sat down” with me at Ooldea, there was not one that ever returned to his own waters and the natural bush life.

There was never a camp, through my thirty-five years of service, where my small mercies were not constantly in demand, but here they were called upon to the utmost. There were sometimes as many as 150 natives in the vicinity of Ooldea. Among them I found sufferers from venereal disease, debility, senility, ophthalmia, bone-magics, broken wrists, burns and spear-wounds, with the occasional outbreak of an epidemic of ring-worm, measles, sandy blight and pneumonia, which meant unending ministrations.

No more half-caste children were born in Ooldea from 1920 onward until the temporary cessation of my work there in 1934, nor was any half-caste ever begotten in any of my camps. I had my own way of dealing with the problem. Like Agag, I walked delicately, by quiet persuasion preventing the black girls from haunting the white men’s huts, and by equally quiet persuasion, from a different angle, deterring the white men from association with them, an appeal from a woman of their own race and colour to play the game that never faded. Three half-castes had been begotten at Ooldea in the year before my arrival. One was taken to the German mission on the west coast of South Australia. The other two were destroyed in infancy, one of them thrown into a rabbit-burrow, and the other scalded to death by a billycan of hot tea thrown over both mother and child by the black husband.

Never at any time in any Ooldea camp did I receive government rations for distribution or public charity of any kind. By this time the proceeds from my north-west station properties were wholly exhausted. I still possessed a freehold in Perth, a small residential estate overlooking the banks of the Swan River, upon which it was my intention to build a home for my declining years. So many times had I beguiled away the loneliness and hardship with architectural plans of that little home, envisioned its simple comforts, and worked and idled in its gardens-a dream that was not to be, for here I found a need far greater than my own. I ordered the sale of my freehold in my first year at Ooldea, with most of the personal possessions that remained to me, including my sidesaddle and bridle-last relic of a happy past. When this moneyy too, was engulfed in the usual routine order of flour, tea, sugar, onions, medical supplies, dress material, shirts, trousers, and a little tobacco for comfort, I depended wholly upon the earnings of my pen, contributing to Australian and Home newspapers my scientific gleanings of general interest, the legends that had occupied years in the collection, and the human stories of the curious people to whom I have devoted my life.

When visitors and friends from interstate and overseas showed interest in my work, and wished to send donations, my expressed wishes were always for flour and tea and sugar and porridge. It sounded greedy, but it meant so much to see the little ones jooni-............