"THE RED CENTRE."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

"THE RED CENTRE."

HEART OF AUSTRALIA. FASCINATING VARIETY. "... A country of fascinating variety in physical features, and with a comparatively wide range of vegetable and animal life, which, until quite recently, has suffered little disturbance of its primordial conditio.i." Few will admit the possibility that this description is applicable to a large area of inland Australia, which is popularly believed, even in the Commonwealth, to be virtually all a desert, monotonously flat, treeless and dry. Dry it certainly is, but on the authority of Mr. H. H. Finlayson, honorary curator of mammals in the South Australian Museum, who in the summers of 193135 has made sojourns in the interior totalling thirteen months, large areas of it are not fiat, or treeless or desert. The description of the country and its habitants, published in a volume* by Mr. Finlayson, is to the uninstructed layman a revelation. Mr. Finlayson writes particularly of the country of the Aboriginal Beserves, which lie on the intersection of the boundaries of West, South and Central Australia, and generally of the southwest portion of Central Australia, where, he says, the drabness which characterises the more southerly dry country has little place. "Sand, soil, and most of the rocks are a fiery cinnabar," and the area might well be kno«;n as the Bed Centre. This is by far the largest of these areas which are to-day almost as they were before the white rran came —and the pests that came with him. The Oolacunta. Many a reader of this hook (Australians included) may conclude that Central Australia is a strange and foreign country, concerning which much remains to be discovered. Mr. Finlayson himself was responsible for the discovery* (or, rather, the rediscovery) of an animal which had been thought extinct, the plain rat-kangaroo. Three specimens of it were sent to the British Museum in 1843 by the Governor of South Australia, Captain George Grey, but no others were taken until 1931, when Mr. Finlayson, with a white companion and four blacks, set out on an expedition from a homestead 700 miles north of Adelaide. The blacks located a rat-kangaroo (or oolacunta) and the party ran it down after a chase of twelve miles on horseback. It was a little animal of about a rabbit's size, but built like a kangaroo, with long spindly hind legs, tiny forelegs folded tight on its chest and a tail half as long as its body. Later on one of the blacks astounded the white men by catching two of the animals alive, with his hands! It was an astonishing exhibition of the aboriginals skill as a hunter.

Mr. Finlayson lias much to say about the blacks, and, like nearly all other inen who know them and have no interest in exploiting them, has for them a considerable regard. He admits that the bad old days of public and official indifference to the aboriginal's welfare have gone, but says that the sympathy now given him "very often is the same sort of sympathy which might be lavished on the disappearing marsupials." Mr. Finlayson urges that the white man's plain duty to the myalls (that is, the aboriginals, who are still in their native state) is "to reduce all interference with their ways of life to a minimum—regardless of how benevolent in design such projected interference may appear." Their worst enemies are a number of white men "in whom foulness and treachery are perfectly blended." Shepherding the Flocks. Very different from thess degenerate specimens of the white race are the real pioneers, and notably the six men, of whom Mr. Finlayson writes, who hold "stations" in the "Centre" hundreds of miles from any settlement. Their "stations" are unfenced, and as the country is infested with wild dogs the sheep must be shepherded all day and yarded every night. Aboriginal women are the shepherdesses. There are no' permanent homesteads, for the flocks must be continually moved on to fresh feed and water. This is the scene on "moving day":— First, with skylarking and shrill laughter, go the younger gins and older children, driving the sheep ahead of them, and with the milch goats forming a far-flung fringe to the flock. Then follow the older folk and young children, with the horses and donkeys and a long string of camels, with all the heavy camp gear and the household goods. Next are the lordly bucks who own the shepherdesses as their wives or daughters. They walk easily, each with but a handful of spears, for it is their women who do the white man's work, and burdens are not for such as they. And last, bringing up the rear on a stocky pony, and shouting stentorian directions to the giggling gins, comes the solitary, bearded white man. ... A curious scene. As the procession passes, with its babel of sounds and animal smells, time seems to have slipped back some thousands of years, and it is the wealth of a shepherd king of old that files before one." This—it needs emphasis —is in the continent where are also mammoth cities, great modern industries, air transport lines, radio broadcasting services and Mr. Don Brad man. Beyond the pastoral zone, says Mi. Finlayson, the horse is now little more than a memory of the first explorers. "But the camel is supreme, a necessity of life and work, and to almost ever experience of the country whic lon ' bring to mind there clmgs some mem o 1 the tall beast that bears for one the h«at and burden of the day.' He has much of interest to say about the peculiar usefulness of the ca" ie > also of its personal peculiarities. Tlik , for example: A camel he travelled with for three and a half days, m very hot weather, on arrival at a spring df ank thirty-three gallons of water, and then after a quarter of an hour a further ten gallons. . There are chapters in the book on the o-eographical features of the area, the animal life, the blacks and the whites, and there are over fifty excellent photographs. It is a book deeply satisfying to the reader, because it is written simply, from deep knowledge, by a man with an interesting! mind. *"The Red Centre: Man and Beast in the | Heart of Australia." by H. H. Finlayson. Angus and Kobertson, Sydney.