AUSTRALIA'S BLACKFELLOW IN HIS NATIVE WILD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 11 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIA'S BLACKFELLOW IN HIS NATIVE WILD.

Curious and Interesting Adventures in Unmapped Tribal Areas

LEARNING THE WAYS OF A STONE AGE PEOPLE

JUST a year ago T was doep in the bush of the Australian Never Never. beyond the fringe of settlement in the north-west of the continent. I had been roaming for nearly two years from one native camp to another on an anthropological expedition to the centre and north-west of North Australia, ■where the last of the Mack tribesmen are "to be found, says .E. It. Stanner. formerly lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney, writing in tlie "Illustrated London News." My diary reads: — "Night is coming on. Tlie blacks are drifting into camp from the day's hunt. Children and women are whirling firesticks in the air to rekindle the dying sparks. Three or four tiny children are playing on a scalded plain to the west of the clump of timber where the camp is settled for the night. One of them, a miniature in the dusk, throws a toy boomerang at the sinking sun, and then stands as if in awe at his magnificent gesture. The others shout: 'E! E! The sun is frightened. See it goes away.' The younger women are piling bushes and strips of bark to make a rough wind- | break. Marawork (the wind) is cold •W>-night. The fires are lighted to form a small circle, twenty-odd feet across. The small family groups sit between two fires, and all turning inward face each other across the circle. Children are fetching water in folded strips of bark from the billabong. A Vanishing Race. Food is scorching on the fires. Someone is already blowing through the <1 i<ljeridu (a small hollow wood pipe), there is a tap-tap-tapping of hardwood sticks in accompaniment, and a high, edgey tenor is chanting a song while the preparatory work of the night camp goes on. Is it possible for nie to understand these people? With the night around them, they need no walls. They are on simple but adequate terms with living. Earth to sleep on, bark sheets to keep the dew off, fires to lie between, food on the coals, laughter and gossip and slander being bantered about. Here and there silent oki people, and children playing on the edge of the. darkness and the glow from the fires."

I had seen it all many times before. The blacks had long since ceased to bother about my proximity. I had become to them an odd sort of person, harmless enough unless you stole the possessions he so unreasonably would not share all round, and a bit given to asking impertinent questions. One had to he content to earn and to keep such a reputation, far ethnographical fieldwork demands self-effacement. Consequently, I was prepared to sit under my coolibah tree at a little distance from this camp and \ratch the community of the night within its ring of fires.

Burns with Nomadic Restlessness. The blackfellow is a nomad. He grows no crops, and builds no village®, except where whites have encouraged him to settle down on cattle stations or on missions. Even then he is restless, and each year takes his spear and swag and billycan and "goes bush" for his "walkabout." My job as an anthropologist, to make him stand still and talk about himself at times when he burned with restlessness to hunt the wildfowl in the marshes, or to go spearing fish on the sandy shallows of the rivers, often proved too much for him, and much too much for me. Yet I met endless kindness and much courtesy among these simple folk. When I settled down for. tho wet monsoon season among a group of tribes who made camps in patches of thick jungle, as much to protect themselves from sorcerers as from the weather, I was shown how to thatch a hut with "paper bark" from the giant tea tree. When it was necessary to cross creeks and rivers, where crocodiles abounded, blacks swam on both I sides of me. When my rations were exhausted and I faced the bleak prospect of several months of living on what my rifle could get me in swampy country, I was supplied with geese eggs, roots, yams, wild honey, and fish. I made it a practice to exchange tobacco, tea and sugar for these foods, so building my relations with the tribes on a firm basis of reciprocity. When I made. Io»)» exploratory treks with natives into parts of their tribal territories, which had to be mapj>ed and

Such scenes are vanishing from Australia. In a tour of at least 10,000 miles, from Broken Hill, in western New South Wales, right across the centre of the continent, into the spinifex desert, the arid central steppes, as far west as the w «ter Timor coastal belt, and into the swamp plains of the Daly and Fitzmaurice River country, I often covered immense distances without seeing a uf/ 0 ' native life. In many places the blackfellow has vanished as though he had never been. The Australian native imgbt have been a shadow moving- in the trees, for all th e impress he has made on his environment. Here and there one nnds a midden of shells, or a cave of bones, or a rockface covered with crude designs in ochr e and kaolin, but that is

Well Disposed and Friendly. Where the tribes do remain they are well disposed and friendly. There is no Part of North Australia where whites who maintain careful relations with the blacks need fear violence. Unharmed, I went by lorry, lugger, canoe, paekhorse, camel, and foot into every part of the area selected for my work by the Australian National Research Council, which administers the Rockefeller endowment for anthropological research. Soho holds more terrors than the Australian bush, if one makes a reservation or two about crocodiles, the malarial anopheles mosquito, snakes, and the danger of perishing from thirst. The not-infrequent tragedies which do occur are usually the penalty of foolishness. The bad old days are gone, as far as danger from native tribes is concerned, and the interior of the continent is criss-crossed with rough tracks on which one is always within reach of help. Along the overland telegraph line between Alice Springs and Darwin, where desert and a waterless plateau beat back the explorers who were the first to brave the inland in the middle of last century, small-car honevmooners are not uncommon. There is no settlement worth speaking of, nor is it likely that there will ever be. The fact that the telegraph line is there, with a few pin-points of settlement along it, k sufficient to attract wild tribesmen in from the western Bpinifex desert to see the "white pfella" at close quarters, smoke hi* tobacco, eat his ? »gar and flon-v and then wander west again.

on rainy days without matches, and a hundred tricks which make life in the bush much easier for a greenhorn. I was enown how bamboo is cut and bent in hot ashes after sun drying, to make he shafts of spears. Some of my inrormants tried to teach me to follow .racks with their own skill, but a leaf irushed aside here and grains of soil listurbed there kept most of their secrete : rom me. My fumbling attempts at the anguages were corrected with patience md good humour. The syntax of the aboriginal dialects is bewikleriiir. even to one reared on Via latum, ana the mastery of their multiple genders, thousands of verb forms, complex system of prefixes and infixes and subtle idioms, is a task for the most skilled of linguists. It is through a grasp of the language that on« first sees with native eyes. It struck home how differently these Stone Age folk, whom we expect to leap overnight into the twentieth century, must see the world. I understood more of the myths which pointed out a stone as the spirit centre from which children origi'nate. I understood how the wind moving in branches might be the movements of spirit children searching for mothers. I saw how plausible beliefs in sorcery and . magic must seem, given the background of tiought and traditional belief into which I wm feeling my way. Picturesque Pageants. When it was seen that I was making a serious and sympathetic attempt to understand them, not to mock, I was invited to attend secret totemic ceremonies which are sacred to the point of , death with an aborigine. I watched for months while the yearly cycle of these i dances went on. One could not lightly • forget these picturesque pageant*. Scores , of natives, covered with red and yellow [ oxides and white pipeclay, torsos marked , with emblematic designs of kapok dipped in human blood, wooden drone-pipes l sounding, and immemoriallv-old chants [ being choired by singers, while others, t bronzed with ochre, danced in the light - | of ? r «®t fires, were in themselves a I theatrical spectacle. How much richer

photographed, my gear was carried; twigs which might have scratched or blinded me were always broken to one side; I was helped over the stony ranges on which a booted white man walks clumsily, and grass and leaves were cut for me to lie on at night. All this, often without the asking. The anthropologist is often accused of looking at a native people through rose-coloured glasses, and there is no doubt that he does see a much more attractive side of them than the planter or cattleman called upon to work them. While making due allowance for this, I shall always think with kindliness of the blacks I have known. A man with insight into native life, with strength of personality, and with capacity to master the nuances of a difficult racial relationship, oan find in the blackfellow much to admire and something to like. Let me not make him out to be a paragon. My food was sometimes stolen, I was often mocked and mimicked j behind my back, I was lied to barefacedly, my questions were sometimes answered with nonsense to put off the scent of secret lore, and I was given uncomplimentary nicknames. Yet I was able to spend months alone in the deep bush with natives, and not feel too greatly the loss of white companionship. Bewildering Dialects. During the wet season (the southern summer) the whole of North Australia is a quagmire. As much as 60in of rain falls in four or five months. The white settlements inland are cut off for many months. Packhorses hog to the knees and wheeled transport is impossible. The monsoon blankets the countryside in rain and swamp. Cattle on the great stations are allowed to go unmustered until the dry winter season arrives. Out in the unsettled blackfellow country the anthropologist who is prepared to face a wet season in the open begins to see at this time something of native life in its real meaning. I was taken spear-fishing by day and night and learned to pin sand mullet at 15 paces. I went into thickets of jungle and watched canoes being cut from the soft wood of the kapok tree I was shown which berries to eat, which yams were dangerous, how to make fire

an experience it is to bring to them a knowledge of the symbolisms involved, the mythology they re-enact, and the religious ends they serve. A close observation of daily life in the camp, careful questioning upon incidents and quarrels which occur, much drudgery in collecting family genealogies and vital statistics, and many weary hours spent in testing and checking the data one gathers, help towards understanding Stone Age life and its meaning for the aborigine. Usually at the most vital stage the camp disappears overnight and wanders off 20 miles away. The luckless anthropologist, feeling badly done by, limps overland after them through eucalypt forests and stony gullies. And then to be greeted by a look which says very clearly: "What! You again!"