A LOST RACE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 233, 1 October 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

A LOST RACE.

AUSTRALIAN MEMORIES. SONGS OF OLD AND NEW. (By JESSIE MACKAY.) Mary Gilmore's poetry has ever had the .flow and tho sparkle of water: it was not made; it welled out. First it was tho.rillet children wonder at, seeing it break out of nowhere to trickle down some steep, wet facing above a wayside road. Such were many of tho foambubblo verses in ""Marri'd." Greater waters, sounding, life-giving streams, gushing out from under the green covert of mountain bueh, their virgin foam passing to power in the floods of 6unlight below, tho vital divinity of sunlight—those are met in the many woods of "The Passionate Heart," a lover's book, centring in the last resort in the creature's love for tho Everlasting Lover, its Creator. In the wealth of ordered, settled, yet most sentient and tender thought, and the attained puintessence of art replete in "The Wild Swan," the theme flows on in the gracious manner of noble rivers, calm, enriching, and beneficent to voyagers. In "The Rue Tree" is the hiish of lakes, clasped vitally by land, but living to reflect the native blue of the heavens. What shall- be said of "Under the Wilgas,"* Mary Gilmore's latest offering to tho natal land of her love? Here there is no buoyant bubble of foam, nor the trill of young rivers breaking from any green covert to sunlight, nor the lapping, peaceful flow of rivers that sound fulfilment. Rather does the poet take us back to tho long, primeval plaint of ocean, crying aloud its own homeless woe and the deeper woes of changeful earth, ever removing, ever readjusting itself from a shrouded past to the shadowed hope of a greater future. The Passing Of Arunta. True, they were no seaward race, the dark, ancient child-people, whose miserable ending is the keynote of the first part of the book —the simple joys the author herself saw and shared in early childhood the faintly articulate dirges of .their passing at the hands of a neobarbariem that swept them to violent death or shameful tribal decline. How arresting are the sharp, often rhymeless runes' that are most meet to bewail such a race: Very old was Arunta when Alexander wept; Old, old was Arunta when over Bethlehem Was seen the star that told the birth of Christ; Old, old was Arunta when upward from the deep Was swung the hammer-symbol of Poseidon. Troy rose and fell, but Arunta lived en. Then was Arunta put out in a night. Something of the Celtic mystery of Pantheietic life in Ireland's "Song of Amergin" invests "The Song of the Woman-Drawer," the small, decorated wooden Nurmi, which, unlike the demondefying, larger bull-roarer, was solely the aborigine! equivalent of the troubadour serenader's lute: I am the woman-drawer, I am the cry; I am the secret voice, I am the sigh. I am that power which night Looses abroad ; I am the root of life, I am the chord. From the plaint of the " Woman Drawer" swiftly evolves the whirling force of " Boolee, the Bringer of Life." Not inaptly did this wild people ascribe

the everlasting conflict of sex to Boolec, the whirlwind, "Boolee, tho Giver of Birth ".'v BrPflSt: to breast In the whirling, l'a'lm to palm iu the strife. . . . O Boolee, woman and man! O Boolee, terror and flauie! Yea against Nay in the night. Out of the whirlwind I calne. It is in tho notes of the appendix rather than in the poems that the evil tale of extermination is told, but the tragedy of the Waradgery tribe is sung in age by the little white " sister," tribal ly adopted in childhood, daughter to that wise Cameron who became a " full blood brother " to the fine old chief whose people covered great areas between the Murray and, the Darling. From that dark law-giver the openminded Scottish settler learned, and came to respect, the primal ordinances that' governed tribal marriage, made natural totem-sanctuaries, mercifully conserved the wild forest and the mothering animals within it that man and beast should both find protection and nurture in the land. But what tribal wisdom availed the doomed Waradgery when the white forerunner came, as resolute ae any old Boer, to make the land his own and " shoot the black stuff off it"? Harried wo wore, and spent, Broken and falling, Ere us the cranes we went, Crying and calling Emptied of us the land. Ghostly our going; fallen, like spears, the hand Dropped in the throwing. A Doomed People. There ringe through the reader's memory the doomed cry of the fugitives, Weenyah, Weeny ah, Weenyah? (Whither, whither, whither?). From the vales of Mirrabooka (the Southern Cross) rises the last dirge of the death-driven people:— Only the wind Huns through the valleys, Weenyah, Weenyah, crying, Very lonely. . . . Only tho rain, The rain in the night-time, Fingers at its eyes, ' Weeps for Arunta.

No Australian poet but Mary Gilmore has truly sung the lost child-people; no other ever will. She brings no indictment save that most moving indictment of all, the crying of an injured child. She knows that the murderers are no longer alive, and their sons cannot well bo charged; she does not even invoke the spell of karma against an Australia with this and kindred beginnings, and yet the elect reader knows that no land can escape its karma. Quickly the theme •of this strangely compacted book of Australian pangs, joys, and pities takes up the middle life of pencraft in Sydney some thirty years agone and over. In that strangely intimate and vibrant way of hers she joins past joy to present care in'the retrospect. Horse, woman, and song fired the Aryan era of the prime; horse, woman, and song fire Australia still:— 'The old years toss their banners to the new, Their dust flies, scattered by time's passing hoof — A golden dust that gilds our partial view, Till what is half and what is wholly true Blend like a silken pattern on a woof, And we who now but ask a solid roof, Tell youth of days that loosed the heart like wine, When danger charmed, and age stood far aloof, And A. G. Stephens wrote of Doodlekine. It is hard to hold the peri from quoting these glancing, changing verses that flv from ancient joys to world-sorrows that are rayless and subterrene. Of pangs and pities this strange Australian book is compact; the book of moving history covered by the life of a woman who had her part in all, and still vibrates with life votive and unepent. • " Under the Wilgas," by Mary Gilmore (Robertson and Mullens, Melbourne.)