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Next morning I became ill, with violent pains and headache, which incapacitated me for some days, during which time a lubra named Moira sat beside me, apparently anxious to do what lay in her power to ease my sufferings.
When they arrived near Lake Colac they found the banks of the Barongarook Creek covered with scrub, and on approaching the spot where the bridge now spans the watercourse, they saw a blackfellow with his lubra and a little boy, running towards the scrub.
At the mouth of a side creek coming from the James range, on the eastern side of the Hugh, found an excellent water hole, apparently both deep and permanent. We saw a native and his lubra at the upper end at a brush fence in the water; they appeared to be fishing, and did not see us until I called to them.
She goes up to the old lubra with a look of divine compassion on her beautiful face; the old woman's whine grows louder as she rocks herself to and fro. "Yah marah, Yah boorah, Oh boora Yah! Yah Ma!" "What! old Sally!" says the beautiful girl. "What is the matter? Have you been getting waddy again?" "Baal!" says she, with a petulant burst of grief. "What is it, then?" says Alice.
During the night the mosquitoes worried him incessantly, until one of the coloured ladies, who slept on the ground in the next room, hearing his petulant exclamations, brought him a dirty piece of rag, soaked in kerosene, and told him to anoint his hair, face and hands with it. He did so, and then fell asleep comfortably. * 'Gin, or 'lubra' the female Australian aboriginal.
The Maluka, Mac and the Dandy, looked on in amusement while the missus wrestled with the servant question; and even the Quiet Stockman grinned sympathetically at times, unconsciously becoming interested in a woman who was too occupied to ask questions. For five days I "wrestled"; and the only comfort I had was in Bertie's Nellie, a gentle-faced old lubra almost sweet-faced.
On mentioning the circumstance to one of the early settlers, he said my loam had been taken from the spot on which the blacks used to burn their dead. Soon after he arrived at Colac he saw there a solitary blackfellow crouching before a fire in which bones were visible. So, pointing to them, he asked what was in the fire, and the blackfellow replied with one word "lubra."
Bertie's Nellie and Biddie had been obliged to resign and go with the waggons, under protest, of course, leaving Rosy and Jimmy's Nellie augmented by one of the most persistent of all the shadows a tiny child lubra, Bett-Bett. Most of us still considered Bett-Bett one of the shadows but she persisted that she was the mainstay of the staff.
* Gins. Synonymous with lubra i.e., a wife. "And you will see, boss," he said, as, after they had come a mile and a half, he pointed to a sandbank on the side of the creek, deeply imprinted with footmarks, "we will find them eating fish in their camp. Look there." Grainger saw that on the sandbank were a number of dead fish which had been swept down the creek from pools higher up.
This seemed to anger him, for he said a little roughly: "Why doesn't he come out and give you blazes on the promenade deck, and corner her down with a mighty cheek, and levy on her for a thousand pounds? Both you and she would think more of him. Women don't dislike being bullied, if it is done in the right way haven't I seen it the world over, from lubra to dowager?
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