THE LAW TO KILL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 179, 30 July 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE LAW TO KILL.

ABORIGINAL CONDEMNED. WHITE MAN'S JUSTICE. NATIVE FEAIiED THE ROPE.

The red-robed judge, the bewigged barristers meant nothing to him. His law was the primitive one which actuates a bush native. The " white 'pfella " had not fulfilled his contract. They had fought. The "white 'pfella" had been killed. In the far outback of West Australia " Billy " Narrawanna was known as the only native who wore " white pfella's" boots. Yet when Narrawanna sat huddled up in the Perth Criminal Court, shivering in mortal fear of the rope, he was barefooted. Before him, and for his benefit, was arraigned the pomp and circumstance 01 the white man's justice; the red-robed judge, the jury, the bewigged counsel, the uniformed police, the iron-barred dock. Pitiful Picture. And through it all sat "Billy" Narrawanna, a pitiful picture; thick matted hair that had never known a comb, a rough unkempt beard, shabby clothes. His eyes never left his cold-looking bare feet. The evidence told a grim tale of the lonely outback, of an old prospectors death, Narrawanna not denying he had killed him. " Tom Walls, he make 'em row Narrawanna said in his statement to the police, which he appears to have made with all the childlike frankness of the native. _ "He say, 'Go away, go away.' He hit 'em me on side of face. Me fall down. Then I get up, an' I hit 'em Tom Walls over head with waddy. Me hit 'em plenty time over head with waddy, and he fall down on ground. Then me hit 'em two, three times with axe. He dead then." Narrawanna threw the body down a shaft, where it was found by the police. The prospector, he claimed, had " borrowed " his woman —a gin with the novel name of " Modern " —and had promised to pay him for her in food and tobacco. Two days later Narrawanna went to Walls' camp to retrieve his " gin" and receive his "pay." Walls refused to give him the totacco promised, and was killed. Tragio Story. It was a tragic story, made all the more tragic by the obvious misery and fear of the man who was telling it. Narrawanna could speali little English. Another aboriginal was called in to interpret for him, and through him, in a voice little more than a husky whisper, the aboriginal described the tragedy. Telling of how he did the fearful battering with the waddy and the hacking with the axe did not seem to move him.

For all the interest he took in the return of the jury and the recording of the death sentence, he might have been only some stray black looking casually in at the court. And yet, though the Court may have been a mystery to him, Narrawanna eat in deadly fear of what might happen to him afterwards. He knew that much. Evidently someone had told him about the fate of a murderer. In Kalgoorlie he made an attempt to cheat the rope by slashing his throat. Again, at Fremantle, while he was waiting trial, he picked up a piece of jagged glass in the exercise yard, and dragged it across his wounded throat. However, no full-blooded aboriginal has been hanged in West Australia for the last 30 years, and Narrawanna is certain to be reprieved from the death sentence recorded against him, and given 10 years' penal servitude instead. He has got " white man's justice" for taking tribal justice—the only one he knew!

TOWN OF UNWILLING SPINSTERS. Consett (Durham) girls avow that they will not get married until there are houses for them to occupy. This is the answer to the question asked by the vicar (the Rev. T. H. Briggs), who has commented in his church magazine on the decline of marriages in this large industrial town. Mr. Briggs wrote: "Can anyone explain why our men go to neighbouring parishes ■ for their brides while those parishes so 'hide-bound' by the 'herd instinct' do not return the compliment? Is it lack of enterprise on the part of our girls or is it subtle cautiousness?" The housing position in Consett is such that the local council have several hundred applications from married people, so that young couples about to be married are left out in the cold. As a result of this decline in marriage Consett is being called the "town of unwilling spinsters." Apparently girls in nearby villages are not so particular about housing, and so Consett's young men are marrying outside their own town.

AMATEUR "SLEUTHS" IN GAOL. • The workings of an amateur "police department," which kidnapped a suspect in a double murder case and questioned him for 15 hours, were disclosed at Chicago with the arrest of one of -the volunteer detectives. On March 17 two liquor and shot machine racketeers, Louis Lanza and .Terry Vertnecco, were found strangled to death on the roof at 124, Thompson Street. Friends of the slain men grew suspicious of Patsy Fucci, 20 years old, who had worked for Vertnecco. Two days later Fucci was kidnapped, taken to a vacant apartment at 43b, East Thirteenth Street, tied to a chair and held prisoner for 15 hours while two armed men guarded him. During his captivity he was questioned as to the double murder, and about a score of men came in to look at him. Most of them said: "No, I don't think that's the one." Having escaped a "conviction," 'which probably would have meant his own death, Fucci was driven to the Pennsylvania Station, placed on a train for Canton, Ohio, where his parents live, and warned to say nothing and to remain away from New York. Neither the real police nor the friends of the slain men have solved the double strangling.

WORLD GETS COOLER AND DRYER. Evidence that the world is • growing cooler and dryer—and has been doing so for inillions of years—has been found in tropical jungles by two scientist-explorers. Traces of changes in climate, and also hints of what the world may be like in the future, have been discovered during a strange "journey into the past" by Dr. Ralph W. Chancy, of the University of California, and Dr. Erling Dorf, of Princeton. Their findings were desqribed by Dr. Chaney in an announcement of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In the hot, moist rain forests of Central America and Venezuela the scientists found a sort of "lost world," where plant and animal life closely akin to that of the earth's ancient past still survives. "In the depths of the forest," said Dr. Chaney, "lie many of the secrets of the past — many of the explanations for conditions on the earth to-day—suggestions even of what may be expected in the years that lie ahead. Reconstructing the history of the earth on the basis of the fossil flora of Western America and their living equivalents in the mountain forests of Venezuela and Central America, a trend may be observed during past ages from a moist warm climate to the relatively dry and cool conditions of our day," he went on "The fact of this climatic change is "fully demonstrated by the migration southward of the forests, and the animals which lived in them, to the only part or the world where suitable of temperature and moisture still exist."