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Updated: June 7, 2025
Howitt, who knew his Australian natives intimately, cites the following as "a good example of how the native mind works." To the black-fellow his club or his spear are part and parcel of his ordinary life. There is no, "medicine," no "devil," in them. If they are to be made supernaturally potent, they must be specially charmed. But it is quite otherwise with his spear-thrower or his bull-roarer.
Sax was still conscious, but was too far gone to take any interest even in such an unusual sight as the sudden appearance of a strange naked black-fellow. Death was claiming him, anyhow; it did not matter much to him whether it came by a spear-thrust or by the more lingering method of thirst. The savage stooped down and looked intently into the face of first one boy and then the other.
Black-fellow gossip also reports that the island can be reached by a series of subterranean caves that open into daylight away at the Cave Creek, miles away.
I screamed to myself, and then, throwing discretion to the winds, I gave the war-whoop of the blacks and rushed madly forward, yelling myself hoarse, and supremely oblivious of the fantastic and savage appearance I must have presented with my long hair flowing wildly out behind, and my skin practically indistinguishable from that of an ordinary black-fellow.
One of these very poor devils that I have in my mind has now a considerable fortune, with rooms in a fashionable quarter of London, and in frock-coat and tall hat "swells" it with the best! How quickly men change to be sure! A man who at one time would "steal the shirt off a dead black-fellow," in a few short months is complaining of the taste of his wine or the fit of his patent-leather boots.
Marshalling the blacks before him like a company of soldiers the women, thanks to my prudent instructions, being more or less decently dressed, the men considerably less decently, and the younger children of both sexes being elegantly clad in Nature's undress uniform Jack vigorously addressed his listeners thus: "Big feast made ready for plenty black-fellow to-day, but black-fellow must make clean himself before feast."
"You kill that black-fellow mother belonging to you?" "Yes, master." "Yes," Drysdale continued, "Bimbi went out with a police expedition against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother's head off. As a race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty. They will track their own brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the whites.
For the Australian black-fellow must have got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family, and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
At midnight the prospectors were attacked, Cable and Janet being speared as they lay in their blankets, Cable through the stomach and Janet in the arm, Pickering escaping, for he had laid down his blanket under a tree, away from the packs, to get shade from the moon. He is, too, a man of exceptionally small stature, and so eluded the quick sight of the black-fellow.
In rainy weather, the only precaution I ever saw them take, with a view to protect themselves from wet, was the building a small hut, not much larger than a bee-hive, constructed of the boughs of trees, with a small aperture on one side, into which the "black-fellow" thrusts his head and shoulders, and sleeps as sound as a top, his legs and the lower half of his body being exposed to wind and rain.
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