My healing and my Kabbarli wisdom were a source of all my power. My sympathy and magnetism as I drew the evil out of their bodies, carefully placing it on the fire when my hands had closed upon it, and throwing the smoke of its passing away from the sufferer; my clairvoyance, practised on malingerers now and then; my thunder-and rain-and fire-magic-the knowledge and intuition supernatural in their eyes, helped me through the years in ministering to their ailments and in administering a code of laws that was my own and theirs. My methods of treatment were derived from experience only, without regard to medical theory. Their systems, their foods, their native remedies, their simple ailments, their own ways and lives, their reaction to white things and people, white social housing and hospital conditions,-their unconquerable objection to interference with their bush conditions, all these had to be studied and met and made helpful with my very simple remedies.
I left them in their sandy and grassy beds and shelters, which they could change when they wished or when odours compelled them. I never submitted them to the ordeal of soap and hot water, but used clean olive oil to remove rank smells, but when their odour became objectionable to themselves, they anointed themselves with fresh fat-from bird, animal, or reptile.
Only the commonest of our foods are good foods to them, for bowel disorders usually resulted from the white man’s made dishes, but my own plain diet that kept me healthy made them healthy too. They loved a potato or onion or apple hot from the ashes, cooked a little, part eaten, and again cooked to prolong the pleasure. Their teeth were kept strong and clean through eating the ashes on their cooked foods. Their own varieties of vegetable and root foods were extensive, nutritive and sustaining when droughts limited meat foods, but they were essentially meat-eaters and however plentiful vegetable foods might be, their systems craved strong meat, and quarrels and killings took place.
The sick must be kept tranquil in familiar environment with their own people about them, seeing the dark faces, hearing the familiar speech, and lying on the only bed that their body can adjust itself upon. First and last, their old ways were studied, and so these times of sickness were spent in tranquillity, and they passed over in peace among their own kind. My old-fashioned remedies were particularly successful, making me rejoice that I was of Ireland, where bone-setters and wise women could cure all and sundry. My grandmother’s cough-mixture, the simple recipe of six ingredients that she dispensed to coughing children for fifty miles round-honey, brandy, lemon, olive oil, powdered candy and vinegar (a tablespoon of each)-was most popular, and they desired to continue it long after the cough had gone.
When Gooburdi fell from her mother’s lap into their small fire and both little arms were cruelly burned, carron oil and wadding and white bandages covered with stockings to hide them from the white people’s eyes were made delightful to Gooburdi in a playful way, as I made the tops of the stockings “pocketi” for biscuit or lollie or sweet cake after the dressings were over. I pretended that these came of themselves by Kabbarli’s magic, if Gooburdi would let the little arms rest.
Dhambilgna’s scald from groin to foot, when Dhalberdiggin emptied a billy-can of boiling tea over her and the half-caste child she brought back to Ooldea, was healed in three weeks, with three daily tendings in her sandy bed, Jinnweeli and Nyeedura, her two mothers-inlaw, and their dozen puppies filling the space left for the healer. When I cured Nyeedura’s favourite dog of a broken leg, I received more gratitude and laudation from all camps than when I redeemed a human from the brink of death.
There was gratitude, though there is no native term for it. When I carried poor paralysed Banyarda pickaback to my camp in a heat of 114 degrees that I might sleep beside her to calm her fear, two of the men saw me labouring. “We will carry her, Kabbarli,” they said-the first and only time they had ever offered to relieve me of a human burden or to offer to carry a woman.
There was poor old Banyurda from Koorunda Water, deserted by her group at the siding, whom I carried pickaback to my camp and built her shelter near me, stifling her long wailing with little comforts. But no sooner was she recovered than the men of her group returned, the snake men of two wild and savage groups who had made their first entry into civilization clad in chaff-bags given them somewhere by white men, and they made her crawl to the siding when the trains came, for her pitiable appearance made her an excellent “draw.”
As new mobs came from the great Government Reserves, and mingled with those already within civilization, there were many quarrels. I gave food to the victor to share with the vanquished and doctored the wounds. Soft white ash was an excellent substitute for boracic powder. Rool, the sacred kingfisher, gave Yirgilia a broken thigh-the tree from which he fell was only Rool’s agent. Yirgilia refused to sleep in splints. Day after day we played splinting and unsplinting, but I was able to persuade him to lie quietly, and adjusted the soft sand to the lie of the broken bones until we sent him to Albany, where he recovered.
The few cases of gonorrhoea they brought back with them from their treks along the Bight’s edge and the civilized places were “healed by first intention.” This disease shamed them, and no native sorcerer could cure them. It was visible to their kind, and to the women, and their anger rose and swelled and they beat their women in fury.
If I had a fortune to spend upon them, I should not build one hospital or sick-room, but would repeat and extend my services, keeping them in their own environment. As I myself would shrink from illness under a tree in the open, surrounded by dogs and unwashed humans, with grub and lizard to regale me, so does the ............