For the great work to which, in the enthusiasm of early days, I had set my hand-the interpretation of the mind and soul of the Australian aborigine-was as yet untouched.
The ceaseless garnering of thirty-five years of intensive study had been jealously guarded at great personal cost and trouble through all my wanderings. My voluminous notes had been scribbled anyhow and anywhere, on white paper and brown, diaries and notebooks and fragments, illegible and unintelligible to any save me, packed into any receptacle that would hold them in my eight by ten tent, where they became inextricably mixed and were in constant peril of destruction. Now and again I had taken a bulging bundle, trying to reduce it to lucidity, but with the hot winds and sandstorms and the constant demands upon time and my mercies by the pitiable specimens of humanity about me had only made the ethnological confusion worse confounded.
I had passed the allotted span of life by five long years. My step was as light and my heart as gay as they had been in youth, but I could no longer shut my eyes to the fact that if I were to accomplish my work for Australia and its lost people, I must lose no time.
The hope was qualified with regret, for now I must bid farewell to that little tent home patched with a hundred patches, ragged and empty and devoid of comfort, yet so full of loving memories; Kabbarli must take leave of her grandchildren.
The last few days were unforgettable. I had kept my departure a secret, yet in some mysterious way they sensed that something was toward. “Kabbarli!” came the call all day long at the breakwind, to make sure that I was still there, and now when I went up to the station for my mail the children would be all about me, singing the rain-song that I had brought to them from the far North-west:
Ngoona weeli-weeli burniji ngoona
waving their branches to the plaintive little tune, song and tune coming from the far-off Ashburton areas. Time and again I sat with them on the Kooli hill near my tent, the hill where we had so often been together, scanning the horizon for the smoke of the fires at Boonja Water many miles away, waiting for the coming of the new groups from the thousands of miles north and north-west, doubling and re-doubling in their tracks for weeks and months, fighting and killing and eating on the way.
One day came the news that old Gooyama was lying ill at a camp five miles away, wanting to see Kabbarli. With the extraordinary provision of the dying, he had come 100 miles from Fowler’s Bay in a buggy with Yarrijuna and Stuttering Yarri. He was past food, but it was a pleasure to give some to those who were with him, and nearby I found Ardana, frantic in the belief that his old enemy Jinnabullain had sent magic into his liver. This necessitated a second journey for medicine and magic healing-a twenty-mile walk for me all told-and before I left, Ardana was on his way to fight Jinnabullain by magic or spear.
Old Jinnawillie and Nganamana were lying together in another camp. I bandaged Nganamana’s bitten breast, but Jinnawillie, so little and so fierce, was obviously nearing her end. Her hand and tongue were against everyone but her giant son Dhalberdiggin, for whom she would fight, beg, steal and kill, and for whom she starved her tiny body throughout his life. I think that her poor face changed and softened only for her son and me. I told her that my Father would look out for her in the country she was passing to, but, as she had room only for her son in her life, she feared. “Kabbarli mallingga yanning!” (Grandmother will come soon after you) I comforted Jinnawillie. Not very long after I learned that she was dead.
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