As the years passed, I was more and more convinced that it was impossible to leave these people, to be deaf to their appeal for human kindliness, and of the hopelessness of any movement except one of help and comfort to the individual, and personal example. So savage and so simple, so much astray and so utterly helpless were they, that somehow they became my responsibility. All along the thousand miles of railway, there was no other sanctuary, no half-way house, as it were, between the white man’s traffic and the native intelligence, five thousand years behind.
I did my utmost to arrest the contamination of civilization. Many times I sought facilities to pitch my camp at Boonja Water, sixty miles north, or at Wandunya Water, 140 miles north-west, where I might have retained many of the natives about me, to lead their own natural lives without clothing and without cunning. At Ooldea, not wishing to interfere in their associations with the white people, who were always kind to them, I could do no more than think for them with my “black-fellow’s mind,” dispensing my Kabbarli wisdom for what it was worth from the knowledge gained through half a lifetime, and my Kabbarli comfort to the very limit of my means and my physical endurance. I could not keep them long enough with me to hope for the humblest results, for even when I had plenty of food for weeks, they would still go on, up and down the line, wandering for any reason or noreas on. “Koorda kombinyil” (Heart getting hot!) they told me, and, clambering on the trains, would be off, in their nomad eagerness, to Tarcoola, to Kalgoorlie, to anywhere between.
Apart from the effects of malnutrition and epidemics and disease, death-magics and bone-pointing had always to be combated. When they believed that the bone of a dead man had been levelled at them by an enemy, they would lie down in their little beehive bough-shelters and refuse all food unless I took the magic out of their bodies. I was generally successful in my treatment of these purely psychological but often fatal illnesses, and would solemnly remove and burn and bury the offending magic, gaining a great reputation as dhoogoor maamw ngangarli (doctor of old-time witchcrafts).
Death quickly claimed the weakest of the newcomers. It is sad reading in my diary of the deaths of young people in those days at Ooldea. Some had been but a few months in touch with civilization when they turned aside from their groups to die, and those who had drifted away came back always with their numbers lessened.
There were a few who assimilated easily and survived amazingly. Nyan-ngauera, who came down with the first group in 1920, is still on the line, a case-hardened beggar. With another group from the border was one little girl, Nandari, about nine years old, of marked intelligence and spirit. After a few days she set off by herself on a goods train to Cook, where she changed for Kalgoorlie, and was so delighted with the adventure that she spent most of the next three years travelling up and down on every train that would give her a footing.
My work, as always, was confined to attendance upon the sick and feeble, the very old, and the very young. For the full-grown healthy male natives I had neither rations nor blankets. I encouraged their hunting-crafts and the subsistence upon their own foods, which were to the natives plentiful in good seasons, nourishing and suitable.
In that grey and apparently barren bush, where a white man would starve to death if left to his own resources, the healthy native could find food in plenty, mulga apples, acrid but sustaining, quandongs white and red, kalgula and koolyoo, a potato-bulb creeper trailing over the jam-wood trees, fruits and roots and berries innumerable, edible grasses and beans. Kangaroo and emu had become rare, but the white man’s rabbit had taken their places in myriads. There were mallee-hens in the valleys and frogs in the swamps. A harrowing thing it is to see them squeeze the water from these frogs and throw them on the coals. Everything is eaten half raw, save the rabbit, which is well cooked, and every bird and beast and creeping thing provided a meal, including the banded ant-eater and the barking lizard. Many of the interesting botanical and reptilian specimens that I have forwarded to Australian and British Museums were rescued from annihilation in the natives’ evening fire. The only living thing they conscientiously objected to devouring was the marsupial mole, that quaint little creature of the Nullarbor Plain so seldom unearthed that the natives believe that it never brought forth a baby. The mawgu, or witchetty, a delicate white grub found in the roots and bark of mallee and mulga and other trees, with its creamy almond flavour, was the favourite dessert, but, though highly popular throughout Central Australia, it was eaten sparingly by the wise, who found it rich to biliousness.
As each group came and went, it left me the legacy of its derelicts. Veiled from the flies-and the flies of the Ooldea mallee in the summer season are a monotony of torture-I threaded the camps in some miles of difficult sand-walking, with the day’s provisions slung over my shoulder in calico bags. The frocks I distributed to the new arrivals were frequently burned in a night from ignorance or carelessness at the sleeping fires. The food would be shared with all who laid claim to it. There was a terrible instance of this in Ngannana, a woman who came in with six or seven men, all naked and very primitive. I showed her how to make a damper and gave her a bag of flour. Next day I found her savagely mutilated, and learned that the men who could lawfully do so had taken all the food from her. When her great hulking son had come in to find none spared for him, his fiendish revenge was the act of a wild animal.
When Mooja–Moojana’s mob came in, some semi-civilized relatives showed the man a tomahawk. It was such a vast improvement upon his old flint yabu that Mooja felt its edge in wonderment, kept it near him as a treasure, and when his woman returned from the day’s reptile hunting, almost cleft her buttock in two as an experiment. I confiscated the tomahawk, spent the morning refining the subtle differences between “waijela” and “waddi” in this regard, and threatened to call in waijela policeman (baleejeman) should he offend again.
In November, 1920, an epidemic of sandy blight broke out among the natives young and old, and in attending them I developed the complaint myself, a very painful granulation that resulted for a time in almost total blindness. The nearest doctor was at Port Augusta, 427 miles away. I dared not venture beyond the confines of my breakwind, but I could thread the well-known tracks within it without injury, and grope my way to the pipe-line for water. By covering all the things I used most with white tops, I could manage to attend to my own needs, and to feed the natives, who daily brought me firewood. They were amazed at my affliction and looked upon me with “Physician, heal thyself!” written very legibly upon their faces, for was I not ngangarli, doctor of all magic hearings? The recurrent attacks of this malady that I endured alone in the ensuing years were the most difficult periods I have known in all my life. Not once but several times, bending over my open fire-place to make my cup of tea, a smell of burning has been my only warning that my clothing was on fire. So grave and so prolonged was this first attack that I believed I was threatened with permanent blindness, and early in 1922 made the thousand-mile journey to Perth to consult an oculist. That was to be the last holiday-if holiday it can be called-for twelve years of so much increasing difficulty and disheartenment that, had it not been for the guiding light of my ideals of service, and my deep love and sympathy for the natives, I could never have lived them through.
Twenty-five, and sometimes forty at a time, would come to me for food and clothing. I loved to hear them chattering outside the breakwind, and if I had recently received a cheque for an article, there was plenty for all. There was an eclipse of the sun on September 21, 1922, and the natives ran to me in fear. They told me that the hand of maamu-waddi, the spirit man, was covering the earth while the sun and moon were guri-arra-husband and wife together. They believed that it presaged disaster, and clung to my clothing as I sat with my smoked glasses, quietly observing the phenomenon.
“You see,” I said, “Kabbarli gathers the maamu to her, so that it cannot hurt you,” and they were quietened.
Nevertheless, disaster was on our track.
In 1922, two bores put down at the Ooldea Soak resulted in an outgush of-salt water. It was the beginning of the end of this magical Yuldil-gabbi that had not failed its people in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations. In the few brief years since the white man’s coming, 52 wells had been sunk, providing 70,000 gallons a week for the railway. The late H. Y. L. Brown, one of Australia’s greatest pioneer geologists, had advised that no boring should be undertaken, but in continual experiment the blue clay-bed that formed a natural reservoir had apparently been pierced. The waters became brackish, injurious to the engines, unpleasant to the taste, and gradually seeped away. In October, 1926, Ooldea Soak closed down. The two towering tanks at the siding, from which supplies had been freighted up and down the line, were now useless. A number of 400-gallon tanks were installed at each siding and the fettlers’ weekly supplies were brought from Kingoonya over 100 miles eastward, and Kalgoorlie, 600 miles west. The natives were forbidden access to these tanks and forced to procure their water direct from the Soak three and a half miles away, where one well even yet yields a limited supply. The valuable pumping machinery was guarded against them, and they had to beg for their water.
My only recourse was to carry my supplies a little over a mile across the steep sand-hills in two four-gallon kerosene tin buckets twice and sometimes three times a day. The unaccustomed strain on my arms led me to try all sorts of ruses. I first adopted the old English dairy-yoke method, but my digging-stick was unsteady and galled my shoulders. I tried a series of billy-cans and more frequent journeys, very wearying in the hot sun. I even emulated the natives by balancing a kerosene-bucket on my head with a monguri-a circular head-pad stuffed with hair and fur-string-but stumbling and stubbing my toes often sent the bucket flying, deluging me with my supply. I could never accomplish more than eight gallons in one journey, and when a thirsty native came out of the wilds and pointed to his lips, I would give him a gallon in one gulp. Restrictions were rigid. I was in honour bound to give my water only to the weak, and had to watch till they finished it, otherwise it would be wolfed by the others, or poured on their heads for coolness.
Water-carrying became more and more strenuous, and as I approached the allotted span I sent a request to the railway workshops at Port Augusta, asking that a little go-cart to carry two tins might be made. The cart duly arrived, in the nineteen-thirties, and the makers refused payment, a kindly gesture that I appreciated. The weight of water over the rough track twice broke the wheels in the heavy sand, and eventually iron wheels three inches wide had to be fitted. The empty cart was heavier than the full cart, a matter I have never been able to explain. To the very last week of my camp life I trundled this heavy load over the sand-hills, in the summer making three and sometimes four two-mile journeys in the day.
The failure of the water-supply coincided with the commencement of an eight-year’s drought, perhaps the worst in South Australian history. Year after year, little or no rain fell upon the parched earth. The mighty Plain was but a shadow of the pale empty skies. Native foods dwindled and vanished, fruit and root and berry. All the rain-songs were in vain. Now and again gabbi-jean (the rain clouds) mercifully covered the sun for an hour or more, but before their promise could be fulfilled a barbed spear of wind would send them flying across the scattered hills of Wilba-thali, kicked up helter-skelter in the dreamtime by Wilba the Wallaby to confound and confuse his enemy. Raging winds scoured the plain, coming together with a dash in the visible combat of the whirlwinds, at which the women, in fear, threw handfuls of sand lest it should give them a baby. When they saw me whirled round and about in these opposing forces, with no evil results, “What big magic belongs to Kabbarbi!” they said in wonderment.
Summer temperatures soared to 114 and 120 degrees for weeks, even months, at a time, culminating occasionally in a shade record of 126 degrees. At ordinary times the average rain in a year was less than four inches. I have often watched heavy curtains of rain falling from a cloud high up, to evaporate somewhere in the hot dry dome above the plain, and many a heavy oncoming storm mill away in the wind like the steam of a railway engine.
Sand-storms raged for hours at a time, and the world was darkened. When the heaviest gusts threatened to rob me of house and home, I clung frantically to the ridge-pole of my tent, pitting my slender weight against the strength of the elements, and when they abated crept in exhausted to find my stretcher, my table and everything else within covered in nearly a foot of sand. I built my breakwind up to twelve feet high in order to protect my tent in these ruinous winds and sweeping sands, but it was of little avail.
To write the newspaper articles that meant the sustenance of so many under such conditions was at times impossible. My first typewriter became a ruin. The second baffled me in that my hands were so painfully burnt and blistered with the heat and dryness, the wear and tear of constant watercarting, and my years of attendance on the sick that at one time I essayed the art of typewriting in seven finger-stalls and failed dismally.
Only once, when tying up poor Jajjala’s arms and legs for burial at about 2 a.m., having had to hurry to their call, did I forget my gloves. A needle had run into a finger-nail that day, and into this tiny crevice poison entered. For about six months I kept up a counter-irritant by putting my finger into boiling water, healing and again blistering, and so saved finger and nail, so that today only the tiny needle-point route can be seen.
Many people, both in private and in the Press, have expressed amazement in that, in the heart of the Australian desert, I have always adhered rigidly to the incongruity of gloves. The explanation is simple. From the time of my first ministrations to the diseased-often repulsively diseased-natives of the north-west and the south-west of Australia, gloves have been my safety from contagion. I have kept dozens and dozens of the cheapest always ready, and immediately on my return from the anointment of sores, the bathing of eyes, and septic wounds, and other dangers of infection, both gloves and hands have been steeped in boiling water. It was a drastic safeguard but a very necessary one.
In 1925 Ardana brought in his contingent, all young men and all orphans, their fathers having been killed and eaten before their initiations. Mirnaambula came with the men, women and children in his group, and others from east and west with boys for the manhood ceremonies. The transcontinental and its traffic clashed noticeably with these age-old rites. The old men and brothers-inlaw sometimes arrived by train, wearing felt hats and calling themselves “dokkatur,” with the initiation knife, whittled from a glass bottle, a pointing-bone, some hair-string and various magics carried in a “doctor’s bag,” an old suit-case they had picked up along the line. Their fees, in the matter of food, were high, and for the most part provided by me. Occasionally a boy, if closely associated with the white people, was completely overlooked, and I have seen an uninitiated boy daring to take a woman-a matter of instant death under the old law-actually daring to throw his spear into the camp, demanding that she should come to him, regardless of marriage restrictions, which no longer existed.
In the midst of Juginji’s blood-drinking period, when he was isolated from his group between my camp and the Soak, some excitement carried those responsible for the boy’s sustenance away to some other siding, all save his brother, Waueri. I accompanied Waueri to where the boy was hidden, and swung the big bull-roarer over the two, while Waueri tied a ligature about his arm, dripped the blood thereof into a wooden scoop, and gave it to the boy to drink. I then produced a big damper and a billy-can of tea and gave them to the famishing initiate. It was against the ceremonial law that the boy should have any other sustenance than human blood at this time, but there were none who dared to question Kabbarli.
I kept religiously to their prejudices and tabus, and was as mindful of their tribal restrictions as they were themselves. By attending their totemic and initiatory ceremonies I tried to keep alive in them the will to live.
The totem ceremonies had also degenerated. One early morning I was called out by the usual native sign — a sort of insect buzz. On the hill-top three natives were sitting beside the huge effigy of a snake and its eggs, the snake fastened to a straight pole, about ten or more feet between its curves. It was made with grass and covered with dirty rag in lieu of the human hair which is its proper decoration, with ochre, pipe-clay and birds’ down, its eggs, two concentric circles, ochred and outlined with white down. The men scooped out a long narrow hole in the sand and we all stood round as two of them reverently lifted the snake and set it standing on the hill-top. Be............