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Updated: May 31, 2025
But the two or three whites who formed the crew forcibly prevented the black-fellows from carrying out their plan. This gave rise to much discontent, and eventually the blacks, in desperation, openly rose and mutinied.
In a few minutes the horses were gorged, and hard at work on the rough grass near the holes. Hardy horses, indeed! We took a two days' rest for the sake of the grass, and varied our daily fare of salt beef with small, tufted pigeons, which came in large numbers to drink. We shot nearly one hundred of them, and ate boiled pigeon three times a day with the voracity of black-fellows.
He lived where he happened to be in a town hotel, in the best room of a homestead, in the skillion of a sly-grog shanty, in a shearer's, digger's, shepherd's, or boundary-rider's hut; in a surveyor's camp or a black-fellows' camp or, when the horrors were on him, by a log in the lonely Bush. It seemed all one to him.
The stock of poultry was then rounded up by the black-fellows for his inspection thirty-seven dissolute-looking ducks, ninety-three degraded and anaemic female fowls, thirteen spirit-broken roosters, and eleven apathetic geese. Denison caught one of the ducks, which immediately endeavoured to swallow his fore-finger, under the impression it was food of some sort.
We reached the encampment of the black-fellows late that same evening, and were at once handed over to the charge of the women, who kept us close prisoners and so far as we could judge abused us in the most violent manner. Of course, I don't know exactly what their language meant, but I do know that they treated us shamefully, and struck us from time to time.
A falling star, the white men said, was the rope the black-fellows saw; and they laughed as the blacks crouched down in fear by the camp-fire when they caught the flash of a shooting star. But that was afterwards after the time when the things had happened which made the old black-fellow sad and weary.
Who'd run this country except us? Here's Australia; there's Africa; there's America; there's India; and there's "home;" and who runs the lot if it ain't us? And what's the world outside of that lot? A few paddocks full of dargoes and black-fellows ready to cut each other's throats if it wasn't for us." He put his pipe once more between his lips, and sat thinking in silence.
Travellers on this road had been kept lively by a band of marauding black-fellows, most of whom had "done time" at Rotnest Jail for cattle-spearing, probably, on the coast stations.
The case with the two discs came down this afternoon while you were out with the chair." "Oh!" cried Tom eagerly. "You haven't unpacked them without me, uncle?" "No, and I do not mean to. We'll leave them where they are till our visitor has gone, and then we shall have to work like black-fellows to make up for lost time." "Yes, uncle," cried Tom, rubbing his hands.
On return to camp, after an absence of not more than half an hour, I was astonished to see it surrounded by the tracks of numerous "black-fellows." I guessed they had paid us a visit for no good purpose, and was hardly surprised when I found that they had not only stolen all our flour, but added insult to injury by scattering it about the ground.
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