During all these years the conscience of Australia had been slowly but surely awakening to the tremendous human problem of the aborigines throughout the continent in the rapid dwindling of the native groups in all settled areas and the inevitable conflict as colonization extended. The desire of both State and Federal Governments was to preserve and foster the race, and to temper justice with mercy in their dealings with the native offender. The system of Police patrols, protectorships and Christian mission organizations could offer no satisfactory solution. Beyond the pale of civilization in the great Northern Territory there was unending trouble, cattle killing, tribal murder, the murder of white prospectors and the massacre of Japanese and Malay pearling-crews who entered new country. This was brought to a climax early in 1933 by the tragic death of Mounted–Constable McColl, speared by wild blacks at Woodah Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the course of a police patrol sent out to apprehend certain Caledon Bay natives guilty of the murder of five Japanese, who had beached their luggers on those sandy shores the year before.

Such was the revulsion of feeling of white colonists in the Territory at the death of the young policeman that a “punitive expedition” was mooted, an unfortunate choice of words reminiscent of past horrors that set the whole of Australia up in arms. Loath to sanction such a primitive revenge, and eager to give the savage in his nakedness a fair and just hearing according to the tenets of British law-of which he knows nothing-the Commonwealth Government called for practical advice on the subject from all qualified to give it, and was immediately inundated with conflicting counsel from all corners of the continent.

From my thirty-five years of closest association with the natives, and a comprehensive knowledge of their logics and their temperament, their actions and reactions and such of their own laws as in their universal tribal break-down still abide with them, I offered to travel to the remote native stronghold of Arnhem Land to investigate the matter in the same way in which I had investigated similar matters in Western Australia, officially and unofficially. In August, 1933, I received a telegram from the Minister for the Interior inviting me to visit Canberra immediately to place my plans for the proposed northward journey before Cabinet.

In haste I left my camp on the next passing express, and two days later enjoyed the first bath worthy of the name in twelve years-three quarts of water in a kerosene “bucket” cut lengthwise being the most luxurious that Ooldea, at its best, could provide.

My return to civilization was tinctured with a deep sadness. Gone were the Australia and the Australians I had known. In my brief and hurried glimpse of the now mature and graceful cities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, quite alone and in my old-world garb, I felt a stranger and an anachronism. New South Wales, that I had seen in the making in the eighties, had a brand-new and synthetic city to show me, a city strangely free of the multitudes of men.

It was desired that I should meet all the Ministers in a friendly informal way, and such was my meeting with the Prime Minister himself. The Ministers knew the results of my work, both in Western and South Australia, and their only fear was for the state of my health in an under-taking arduous in the extreme. I assured them of my abundant vigour and vitality, being fully restored to both in the holiday joy of unaccustomed comfort and good living, but their decision, as duly reported to me, was that the difficulties of such a journey into the unexplored wilds of the north, the rigours of the climate of Arnhem Land, the complete isolation of that dark corner of the world, and the possible dangers-though I would have none of them-precluded them from the selection of a woman, and a woman of seventy-four years of age, to carry out the commission.

I returned to Ooldea regretfully, but thoroughly stimulated and rejuvenated in mind and body from that brief but happy sojourn in civilization, a............