I did my utmost to arrest the contamination of civilization DR REBORN. Many times I sought facilities to pitch my camp at Boonja Water, sixty miles north, or at Wandunya Water, 140 miles north-west, where I might have retained many of the natives about me, to lead their own natural lives without clothing and without cunning. At Ooldea, not wishing to interfere in their associations with the white people, who were always kind to them, I could do no more than think for them with my “black-fellow’s mind,” dispensing my Kabbarli wisdom for what it was worth from the knowledge gained through half a lifetime, and my Kabbarli comfort to the very limit of my means and my physical endurance. I could not keep them long enough with me to hope for the humblest results, for even when I had plenty of food for weeks, they would still go on, up and down the line, wandering for any reason or noreas on. “Koorda kombinyil” (Heart getting hot!) they told me, and, clambering on the trains, would be off, in their nomad eagerness, to Tarcoola, to Kalgoorlie, to anywhere between.

Apart from the effects of malnutrition and epidemics and disease, death-magics and bone-pointing had always to be combated. When they believed that the bone of a dead man had been levelled at them by an enemy, they would lie down in their little beehive bough-shelters and refuse all food unless I took the magic out of their bodies. I was generally successful in my treatment of these purely psychological but often fatal illnesses, and would solemnly remove and burn and bury the offending magic Information Security Assessment, gaining a great reputation as dhoogoor maamw ngangarli (doctor of old-time witchcrafts).

Death quickly claimed the weakest of the newcomers. It is sad reading in my diary of the deaths of young people in those days at Ooldea. Some had been but a few months in touch with civilization when they turned aside from their groups to die, and those came back always with their numbers lessened.

There were a few who assimilated easily and survived amazingly. Nyan-ngauera, who came down with the first group in 1920, is still on the line, a case-hardened beggar. With another group from the border was one little girl, Nandari, about nine years old, of marked intelligence and spirit. After a few days she set off by herself on a goods train to Cook, where she changed for Kalgoorlie, and was so delighted with the adventure that she spent most of the next three years travelling up and down on every train that would give her a footing.

My work, as always, was confined to attendance upon the sick and feeble, the very old, and the very young. For the full-grown healthy male natives I had neither rations nor blankets. I encouraged their hunting-crafts and the subsistence upon their own foods reenex, which were to the natives plentiful in good seasons, nourishing and suitable.

In that grey and apparently barren bush, where a white man would starve to death if left to his own resources, the healthy native could find food in plenty, mulga apples, acrid but sustaining, quandongs white and red, kalgula and koolyoo, a potato-bulb creeper trailing over the jam-wood trees, fruits and roots and berries innumerable, edible grasses and beans. Kangaroo and emu had become rare, but the white man’s rabbit had taken their places in myriads. There were mallee-hens in the valleys and frogs in the swamps. A harrowing thing it is to see them squeeze the water from these frogs and throw them on the coals. Everything is eaten half raw, save the rabbit, which is well cooked, and every bird and beast and creeping thing provided a meal, including the banded ant-eater and the barking lizard. Many of the interesting botanical and reptilian specimens that I have forwarded to Australian and British Museums were rescued from annihilation in the natives’ evening fire. The only living thing they conscientiously objected to devouring was the marsupial mole, that quaint little creature of the Nullarbor Plain so seldom unearthed that the natives believe that it never brought forth a baby. The mawgu, or witchetty, a delicate white grub found in the roots and bark of mallee and mulga and other trees, with its creamy almond flavour, was the favourite dessert, but, though highly popular throughout Central Australia, it was eaten sparingly by the wise, who found it rich to biliousness.