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THE COMING OF THE DINGOES
ALTHOUGH that northern part of the Continent of Australia which is called Capricornia was pioneered long after the southern parts, its unofficial early history was even more bloody than that of the others. One probable reason for this is that the pioneers had already had experience in subduing Aborigines in the South and hence were impatient of wasting time with people who they knew were determined to take no immigrants. Another reason is that the Aborigines were there more numerous than in the South and more hostile because used to resisting casual invaders from the near East Indies. A third reason is that the pioneers had difficulty in establishing permanent settlements, having several times to abandon ground they had won with slaughter and go slaughtering again to secure more. This abandoning of ground was due not to the hostility of the natives, hostile enough though they were, but to the violence of the climate, which was not to be withstood even by men so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of Empire.
The first white settlement in Capricornia was that of Treachery Bay—afterwards called New Westminster—which was set up on what was perhaps the most fertile and pleasant part of the coast and on the bones of half the Karrapillua Tribe. It was the resentment of the Karrapilluas to what probably seemed to them an inexcusable intrusion that was responsible for the choice of the name of Treachery Bay. After having been driven off several times with firearms, the Tribe came up smiling, to all appearances unarmed and intending to surrender, but dragging their spears along the ground with their toes. The result of this strategy was havoc. The Karrapilluas were practically exterminated by uncomprehending neighbours into whose domains they were driven. The tribes lived in strict isolation that was rarely broken except in the cause of war. Primitive people that they were, they regarded their territorial rights as sacred.
When New Westminster was for the third time swept into the Silver Sea by the floods of the generous Wet Season, the pioneers abandoned the site to the crocodiles and jabiroos and devil-crabs, and went in search of a better. Next they founded the settlement of Princetown, on the mouth of what came to be called the Caroline River. In Wet Season the river drove them into barren hills in which it was impossible to live during the harsh Dry Season through lack of water. Later the settlements of Britannia and Port Leroy were founded. All were eventually swept into the Silver Sea. During Wet Season, which normally lasted for five months, beginning in November and slowly developing till the Summer Solstice, from when it raged till the Equinox, a good eighty inches of rain fell in such fertile places on the coast as had been chosen, and did so at the rate of from two to eight inches at a fall. As all these fertile places were low-lying, it was obviously impossible to settle on them permanently. In fact, as the first settlers saw it, the whole vast territory seemed never to be anything for long but either a swamp during Wet Season or a hard-baked desert during the Dry. During the seven months of a normal Dry Season never did a drop of rain fall and rarely did a cloud appear. Fierce suns and harsh hot winds soon dried up the lavished moisture.
It was beginning to look as though the land itself was hostile to anyone but the carefree nomads to whom the Lord gave it, when a man named Brittins Willnot found the site of what came to be the town of Port Zodiac, the only settlement of any size that ever stood permanently on all the long coastline, indeed the only one worthy of the name of town ever to be set up in the whole vast territory. Capricornia covered an area of about half a million square miles. This site of Willnot’s was elevated, and situated in a pleasantly unfertile region where the annual rainfall was only about forty inches. Moreover, it had the advantage of standing as a promontory on a fair-sized navigable harbour and of being directly connected with what came to be called Willnot Plateau, a wide strip of highland that ran right back to the Interior. When gold was found on the Plateau, Port Zodiac became a town.
The site of Port Zodiac was a Corroboree Ground of the Larrapuna Tribe, who left the bones of most of their number to manure it. They called it Mailunga, or the Birth Place, believing it to be a sort of Garden of Eden and apparently revering it. The war they waged to retain possession of this barren spot was perhaps the most desperate that whitemen ever had to engage in with an Australian tribe. Although utterly routed in the first encounter, they continued to harass the pioneers for months, exercising cunning that increased with their desperation. Then someone, discovering that they were hard-put for food since the warring had scared the game from their domains, conceived the idea of making friends with them and giving them several bags of flour spiced with arsenic. Nature is cruel. When dingoes come to a waterhole, the ancient kangaroos, not having teeth or ferocity sharp enough to defend their heritage, must relinquish it or die.
Thus Civilisation was at last planted permanently. However, it spread slowly, and did not take permanent root elsewhere than on the safe ground of the Plateau. Even the low-lying mangrove-cluttered further shores of Zodiac Harbour remained untrodden by the feet of whitemen for many a year. It was the same with the whole maritime region, most of which, although surveyed from the sea and in parts penetrated and occupied for a while by explorers, remained in much the same state as always. Some of the inhabitants were perhaps amazed and demoralised, but still went on living in the way of old, quite unware of the presumably enormous fact that they had become subjects of the British Crown.
That part of the coast called Yurracumbunga by the Aborigines, which lay about one hundred and fifty miles to the east of Port Zodiac, was first visited by a whiteman in the year 1885. By that time the inhabitants, having only heard tell of the invaders from survivors of the neighbouring tribe of Karrapillua, were come to regard whitemen rather as creatures of legend, or perhaps more rightly as monsters of legend, since they had heard enough about them to fear them greatly. When one of the monsters, in the shape of Captain Edward Krater, a trepang-fisher, suddenly materialised for them, they thought he was a devil come from the sun, because they first saw him in the ruddy light of dawn and he was carroty. Krater was a man of fine physique, and not quietly carroty as a man might be in these days of clean-shaved faces and close-clipped heads, but blazingly, that being a period when manliness was expressed with hair. When the Yurracumbungas discovered that he was mortal, they dubbed him Munichillu, or The Man of Fire.
Ned Krater wished to establish a base for his trepang-fishing on a certain little island belonging to the Yurracumbungas and called by them Arrikitarriyah, or the Gift of the Sea. This island lay within rifle-shot of the mainland and was well watered and wooded and stocked with game and sheltered from the roll of the ocean by the Tikkalalla Islands, which lay in an extensive group along the northern horizon. The tribe used the island at certain times as a Corroboree Ground. Krater had already visited it before he came into contact with the owners. They first saw him when, waking one morning from heavy sleep following a wild night of corroboree, they found his lugger drifting up the salt-water creek on which they were camped. He was standing on the deck in all his golden glory. They snatched up their arms and flew to cover. One of Krater’s crew, who were natives of the Tikkalalla Islands and old enemies of the Yurracumbungas, told the ambuscade at the top of his voice who Krater was and what would happen if it was with hostile intent that they hid, then took up a rifle and with a volley of shots set the echoes ringing and the cockatoos yelling and the hearts of the Yurracumbungas quaking. Krater then went ashore. After spending some hours sneaking about and peeping and listening to and occasionally answering the assurances shouted from time to time by Krater’s men, the Tribe came back shyly to their gunyahs, among which the Man of Fire had pitched a tent.
Thenceforth till a misunderstanding arose, the Yurracumbungas stayed in the camp, staring at Krater and his strange possessions, and learning from his men all they could tell about whitemen, who were, it seemed, not mere raiders like the brownmen who used sometimes to come to them from the North, but supermen who had come to stay and rule. And they learnt a little about shooting with rifles and catching fish with nets and dynamite and making fires by magic, and came to understand why witnessing such things had disorganised and demoralised the vanquished tribes of whom the islanders spoke. As the islanders said—How could one ever boast again of prowess with spear and kylie after having seen what could be done with rifle and dynamite? Far from hating the invader, the Yurracumbungas welcomed him, thinking that he would become one of them and teach them his magic arts.
The tribes of the locality were divided into family sections, or hordes. When a man or men of one horde visited another, it was the custom to allow them temporary use of such of the womenfolk as they were entitled to call Wife by their system of marriage. Because they regarded Krater as a guest and a qualified person, the Yurracumbungas did not mind his asking for the comeliest of their lubras, though they did not offer him one, perhaps because they thought him above wanting one. But they objected strongly when his black crew asked for the same privilege. The islanders were definitely unqualified according to the laws. The granting of such a privilege to them would mean violation of the traditions, the weakening of their system, the demoralisation of their youth. Thus the Yurracumbungas argued. The islanders said that the old order had passed; and to prove it, one of them seized a lubra and ravaged her. The violent quarrel that resulted was settled by Krater, who hurled himself into the mob, bellowing and firing his revolver. Then Krater ordered the Yurracumbungas to give his men what they wanted.
The Yurracumbungas were struck dumb, appalled by their impotence. Night fell. They sat by their fires, staring at Krater and his men. They stared long after Krater had retired to his tent, long after they had relaxed to their own mattresses of bark. Hours passed. All of Krater’s men, except two who dozed over rifles before the tent, fell asleep, gorged on a great meal of fish.
The headman of the horde was Kurrinua. He had argued fiercely against violation of the laws. He was a man as big and hairy as Krater. In the middle of the night he nudged the man next to him and whispered. His neighbour passed the whisper on. Before long the whole camp knew of his intention. No-one stirred till the tip of the old moon appeared above the bush and splashed the inky creek with silver. Then the man next to Kurrinua crawled without a sound across the clearing to the scrub.
A tiny casuarina nut, shot out of the scrub, struck one of the dozing guards and roused him. He looked about. The camp was silent but for snores and the sigh of the wind in the trees. Then a slight sound in the scrub drew the guard’s attention. He listened intently. Again he heard it. Tiny crackling as of a foot treading stealthily on leaves. He rose, and with the movement roused his mate, who whispered. Both listened, heard a peculiar pattering sound, and went rifle in hand, with backs turned to the camp, to investigate. Louder crackling. Kurrinua and young Impalui rose with stones in hands and sped towards the guards like shadows. The guards were knocked senseless without a sound. The horde rose to knees, women and children and ancients ready to fly, warriors in arms. Kurrinua and Impalui snatched up the rifles, crept to the tent. Kurrinua was crouching at the flap of the tent with rifle raised when—BANG!—a bullet tore through his body, through the tent, crashed into the fire. Impalui had fired accidentally. Kurrinua fell into the tent.
Uproar! Spears whizzed. Rifles crashed. Men roared and howled. The horde rushed, fought fiercely for a moment, wavered, turned and fled. A few of the islanders rushed to the tent, which was collapsed and sprawling about like a landed devil-fish. They pounced on it and dragged it clear of the men beneath, dragged Kurrinua free of Krater’s grip.
Kurrinua rolled over and over like a sea-urchin in a gale, got free of clutching hands and kicking feet, rose, and with blood spurting from his back and belly, plunged into the scrub, followed by a hail of bullets. His pursuers lost him. They spread, passed within a yard of where he lay with thigh-bone snapped by a bullet. He crawled towards the isthmus that lay between the creek and sea, bent on reaching the canoes. He heard cries and shots as other fugitives were found. He was in sandy hillocks out of the shelter of the scrub when the hunters, now carrying torches, rushed on to the beach. He rolled into a hollow and buried himself to the neck.
The night passed, slowly for the hunters, all too swiftly for the hunted. No hope now of escaping by canoe. The hunters had dragged the vessels high. But Kurrinua might swim if he could not walk, swim by way of the sea to the passage and the mainland. Surely he had less to fear from crocodiles than from Munichillu and his men. Still he dared not leave the hollow while the hunters prowled the beach, because they would find the wide track of his crawling before he could reach the creek. They splashed along the water’s edge, crashed through the scrub, crept among the hillocks, never went far away.
The dark creek silvered. The hunters’ torches paled. Birds stirred in the bush. A jabiroo flew in from the sea on great creaking wings, swerved with a swish and a croak at sight of the hunters. Jabiroos were gathering at the Ya-impitulli Billabong for the nesting. The Nesting of the Storks. It was the time of the great Corroboree of the Circumcision, for which the men of Yurracumbunga were gathering.
Swiftly the sky lost its stars and the scrub found individuality. Footsteps. A shout when they found the blood and the track of crawling. Footsteps pattering. Kurrinua looked his last at the gilded skyline. Another shout. They danced around him, pointing, kicking sand in his eyes. Soon Munichillu came, and with him the light of day, as though that too belonged to the like of him. At his appearance the east flamed suddenly, so that the sand was gilded and fire flashed in his beard. He looked at the face in the sand, grunted, raised his revolver.
Kurrinua’s heart beat painfully. His eyes grew hot. The pain of his wounds, which he had kept in check for hours by the power he was bred to use, began to throb. But he did not move a hair. He had been trained to look upon death fearlessly. To do so was to prove oneself a warrior worthy of having lived. His mind sang the Death Corroboree—Ee-yah, ee-yah, ee-tullyai—O mungallinni wurrigai—ee-tukkawunni—BANG! Kurrinua gasped, heaved out of the sand, writhed, shuddered, died. Ned Krater spat. In his opinion he had done no wrong. He did not know why the savages had attacked him. He thought only of their treachery, which to such as he was intolerable as it was natural to such as they.
PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT OF A SOLAR TOPEE
SO slow was the settling of the Port Zodiac district that in the year 1904 the non-native population numbered no more than three thousand, a good half of which was Asiatic, and the settled area measured but three or four square miles. But the civilising was so complete that the survivors of the original inhabitants numbered seven, of whom two were dying of consumption in the Native Compound, three confined in the Native Lazaret with leprosy, the rest, a man and a woman, living in a gunyah at the remote end of Devilfish Bay, subsisting on what food they could get from the bush and the sea and what they could buy with the pennies the man earned by doing odd jobs and the woman by prostitution. The lot of these last was not easy. Fish and game were scarce; and large numbers of natives of other tribes were available as odd-jobbers and prostitutes; and it was made still harder by the fact that they had to dodge the police to keep it, their one lawful place of abode in the land the Lord God gave them being now the Native Compound.
Such was the advanced state of Civilisation in Port Zodiac when the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth arrived there. They were clerks, quite simple men, who came to join the Capricornian Government Service from a city of the South that, had it been the custom to name Australian cities after those who suffered the hardships of pioneering instead of after the merely grand who ruled the land from afar, might have been called Batman, as for convenience it will be called here.
Hopeful as the Shillingsworth brothers were of improving their lot by coming so far from home, they had no idea of what opportunities were offering in this new sphere till they landed. In the ignorance of conditions of life in Capricornia, they came clad in serge suits and bowlers, which made them feel not only uncomfortable in a land but ten degrees from the Equator, but conspicuous and rather ridiculous among the crowd clad in khaki and white linen and wideawake hats and solar topees that met their steamer at the jetty. Nor were they awkward only in their dress. Their bearing was that of simple clerks, not Potentates, as it was their right that it should be as Capricornian Government Officers. When they learnt how high was the standing of Government Officers in the community, especially in that section composed of the gentlemen themselves, as they did within an hour or two of landing, their bearing changed. Within a dozen hours of landing they were wearing topees. Within two dozen hours they were closeted with Chinese tailors. Within a hundred hours they came forth in all the glory of starched white linen clothes. Gone was their simplicity for ever.
Since no normal humble man can help but feel magnificent in a brand-new suit of clothes, it is not surprising that those who don a fresh suit of bright white linen every day should feel magnificent always. Nor is it surprising that a normal humble head should swell beneath a solar topee, since a topee is more a badge of authority than a hat, as is the hat of a soldier.
Carried away by this magnificence, Oscar added a walking-stick to his outfit, though he had till lately been of the opinion that the use of such a thing was pure affectation. Mark still thought it affectation, but did not criticise, first because he feared his brother, and then because his opinions generally had been considerably shaken. Both were changed so utterly in a matter of days by their new condition as to be scarcely recognisable as the simple fellows who came. They dropped the slangy speech that had pleased them formerly, and took to mincing like their new acquaintances, and raised the status of their people when families were talked about, and when the subject was education, made vague reference to some sort of college, while in fact they were products of a State School. Their father, who was dead, had been a humble mechanic in a railway workshop. They described him as a Mechanical Engineer. Their brother Ralph, who was second engineer or third officer on a tiny cargo-steamer, they spoke of as though he were a captain of a liner. They did not lie boldly, nor for lying’s sake. They felt the necessity forced on them by the superiority of their friends. In fact it was Oscar who lied. Mark merely backed him up, not unaware of the likelihood that those to whom they lied might also be liars. But he did not dare even in his mind to question the wisdom of his brother who was by so many years his senior. Oscar was about thirty, and grave in his years when in the company of Mark. Mark was about twenty-two.
Within a week of arrival they knew all the best people in town, including the Flutes of the Residency, head of which house was Colonel Playfair Flute, the Resident Commissioner, first gentleman of the land. As Oscar said gravely, they were Getting On. He appeared to be deeply impressed. Not so Mark, although he took part in the Getting On at first quite as well as Oscar, in fact even better, because he was a youth of more attractive personality. But he was urged mainly by the unusual notice Oscar was taking of him at the time. Previously Oscar had practically ignored him as a very young and rather foolish youth. In fact, but for their mother’s wish that they should be together, Oscar would have prevented Mark from joining him in applying for posts in Capricornia. Their mother was living in the city of Batman with their married sister Maud.
Oscar was soon moved to consider quitting the rather poor bachelor-quarters in which they had been placed and taking a bungalow such as married officers occupied, with a view not nearly so much to making himself more comfortable as to advancing himself socially and in the Service by getting into a position in which he could entertain his superiors as they now condescended to entertain him. Chief cause of this ambitiousness was the fact that through being employed in the Medical Department he had come into contact with the nurses of the Government hospital whose ladylike and professional airs made him feel sensitive as never before of his deficiencies. Mark agreed to share the bungalow willingly, thinking only of comfort.
The Shillingsworths were young men of good taste, as they showed in the style in which they furnished and decorated their new home. Though forced by jealous superiors to take an inferior kind of house, they made of it the prettiest in the town. Mark, who was inventive, fitted up on the wide front veranda a punkah of both beautiful and ingenious design, which worked automatically when the wind blew, that is when its working was not required. Oscar took a smelly native from the Compound and converted him into a piece of bright furniture that made up for the defects of Mark’s machine and called him the Punkah Wallah. This Wallah fellow also waited at table and did odd jobs; and his lubra worked as housemaid. The services of this pair cost the Shillingsworths five shillings a week in cash and scraps of food, and added inestimably to the value they now set upon themselves. Most of their own food they had sent in from a Chinese restaurant.
They had not been living in the bungalow long, when one night they held a party that was honoured by the presence of Colonel Playfair Flute. Then Oscar said gravely to Mark, while watching the temporary Chinese butler at work, “By cripes we’re getting on!” Mark only smiled, too deeply touched by his brother’s pleasure for answer. Within a month of that party Oscar was raised to the post of Assistant Secretary of his Department. He considered that he had become Professional.
Just as Oscar was affected by the atmosphere in which he worked, so was Mark, but with results quite different. Mark was troubled by the fact that while employed in the Railway Department, which pleased him greatly, he was as far removed from the rails and cars and locomotives, connection with which was responsible for his pleasure in his job, as Oscar from the lepers in the Lazaret he dealt with in his ledgers. The work of his hands was merely to record with pen and ink what other hands accomplished with the actual oily parts of that interesting machine the railway. He breathed the mustiness of an office, while the owners of those other hands breathed the smells of locomotives, brakevans, and the flying wilderness. He was a musty clerk, while they were hefty men. When he attempted to discuss what troubled him with Oscar he was told not to be Silly. When he put it to his office-mates he was stared at. When he came out with it one day down in the railway-yards before the station-master and the engineer of the mail-train that ran once a fortnight between Port Zodiac and Copper Creek, he was laughed at and told he was a queer fellow for One of the Heads. The frank contempt of these two last for those they spoke of as The Heads filled him with desire to prove that he was really not one of them but rather one of their hefty selves by telling the truth about his railwayman father. It was only loyalty to Oscar that checked him. Soon he came to detest the perpetual gentility in which he lived as One of the Heads and to wish for nothing better than to be disrated to the company of the hefty fellows of the Yards.
No-one in the railway-yards wanted anything to do with The Heads. When Mark went there in pursuance of his duties, as he did much more often than necessary, eyes that regarded him plainly said, “Here’s a pimp!” He would sooner have lost his job than he would have informed on them for whatever they felt guilty about, as for weeks he tried to prove to them. He won regard at last by taking beer along with his official papers and by betraying secrets of the office.
He fawned particularly on George Tittmuss, the station-master, a giant of a man who awed him with his physique, hefty enough youth though he was himself, and Albert Henn, or Chook Henn as his friends called him, the engineer of the mail-train, a jovial little fellow who was rather kind to him. These men were very popular among workingmen, were what are called Booze Artists, fellows who can drink continuously without getting drunk, or at least not as drunk as youthful Mark got on a single bottle of beer, and very amusing yarn-spinners and musicians and singers. The parties they held in the house they shared were the joy of the railwaymen. By dint of sheer truckling, Mark at last won an invitation to the house to hear Chook Henn play his concertina, or Make it Talk, as his friends said. Soon he began to attend their parties regularly, though furtively. Soon he began to drink in a manner that to him was excessive. Soon he replaced his topee with a grubby panama, and took to rolling his cigarettes and going about the town without a coat. But there were times when a reproachful word from Oscar, who for a long while remarked nothing more than the slovenliness of dress, made Mark feel that he was not the remarkably adaptable fellow he mostly thought himself, but a poor thing of common clay who was weakly retrogressing. When he felt like that he kept away from the railwaymen, resumed coat and topee, and took a spell of gentility.
One night in Henn’s house he told the truth about his father. Forthwith he was accepted as a brother. But even as he staggered home that night arm in arm with Chook Henn and Tittmuss, his conscience scolded his tipsy ego for its folly in having betrayed that best of all men his brother. Next morning, while he lay in that state of stagnant calm which precedes the drunkard’s storm of suffering, Oscar came to him and growled. Oscar was not a teetotaller; indeed he had often drunk with Mark of late; but he carried his liquor like a gentleman, or a Booze Artist, and with dominance forced Mark to do the same. At any other time he would have made a joke of Mark’s condition. But that morning he knew, as half the town did, that Mark had staggered up Killarney Street in Low Company. In a quiet, dry, relentless voice that Mark knew well and dreaded, Oscar called him a fool, a waster, a disgrace, and ordered him to mend his ways. Then he went off, erect, cool, clean, sober, sane, a gentleman, everything that Mark was not. Envying him, loving him, loathing himself, Mark choked, swallowed the scum in his mouth, rose hastily, rushed out to vomit. Oscar at breakfast heard him, rose grimacing, slammed a door.
Mark forsook his railway friends for some time. He did not remain virtuous for long, but made the acquaintance of old Ned Krater, whose tales of life on the Silver Sea made the railwaymen seem almost as musty as himself. Then he began to see Port Zodiac as not a mere place of business but a tarrying-place on highroads leading to adventure. He really learnt to drink through being taken up by Krater. Drink! He began to consider himself a finished Booze Artist, not knowing how he carried his grog, since he often carried so much, nor suffering the aftermaths so badly, since he learnt the trick of taking a hair of the dog. In fact he carried it so ill that the friends he made through associating with Krater often had to carry him home. Hair-of-the-dog made him proof against the criticism of his brother.
And through associating with Krater, he began to take an interest in native women, or Black Velvet as they were called collectively, affairs with whom seemed to be the chief diversion of the common herd. He had heard much about Black Velvet from his railway friends, but had not taken their confessions of weakness for it seriously because they had always waxed ribald when making them. And he heard of it from Government Officers, who also jested about it, but at the same time gave it to be understood that they considered the men who sought the love of lubras—such men were called Comboes—unspeakably low. Although he had often eyed the black housemaid with desire, he had been of the same opinion as his brother Officers till he came in contact with Ned Krater. Krater evidently lived for Black Velvet. He waxed eloquent when he talked about it. He said that it was actually the black lubras who had pioneered the land, since pursuit of them had drawn explorers into the wilderness and love of them had encouraged settlers to stay. He said that a national monument should be set up in their honour. Mark believed him, but could not bring himself to woo the housemaid.
