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Updated: June 19, 2025


The familiar laughing-jackass is to be found everywhere, but his peculiar note differs somewhat in different parts; a blackfellow from the south says that the laugh of the northern bird makes him feel sick, whilst the northern native says the same of the southern kingfisher.

But within twenty or thirty miles of where he was born and bred he knows every track, every range, every hill, every creek, as well as all the short cuts and by-roads. He can bring you miles shorter than any one that only follows the road. He can mostly track like a blackfellow, and tell you whether the cattle or horses which he sees the tracks of are belonging to his country or are strangers.

"Comes as near the blackfellow as it's possible for a white man to get. And you couldn't kill him with an axe. Then start him at any civilised work such as splicing a loop on a wool rope, or making a yoke, or wedging a loose box in a wheel and he has the best hands in the country.

"Easily enough, on horseback," said Sam, "but very difficult to come near on foot, which is also the case with all wild animals and birds worth shooting in this country. A footman, you see, they all mistake for their hereditary enemy, the blackfellow; but, as yet, they have not come to distinguish a man on horseback from a four-footed beast.

Did anybody know where to find a blackfellow, now that he was wanted? "Seems, there had been about a dozen of them camped near the tank in the cattle-paddock for a month past, but they were just gone, nobody knew where.

As they rode, one on the right and the other on the left side of the river, a Blackfellow hailed Charley and approached him, but when he saw Mr. Roper who crossed over upon being called he immediately climbed a tree, and his gin, who was far advanced in pregnancy, ascended another. As Mr.

"There was a tame blackfellow we called Alick, and two gins, living about our station, and he had a daughter we called picaninny Charlotte, ten or eleven years old, who was very quick and smart, and spoke English very well. One morning, when I was in the milking yard, she came to me and said, 'You look out. Cockatoo Bill got your axe under his rug sitting among a lot of lubras.

One of our crew threw out a loaf of bread, which was attached to a piece of rope. A blackfellow and his gin in a canoe close by the ship caught the loaf, but the moving of our boat tightened the line, which pulled him out, his canoe being capsized, and he and his gin were struggling in the water.

"Whitefellow brother belong it to blackfellow."* Neither had the piece of tobacco, which he had put in the stranger's mouth, any effect in bringing intelligible words out of it, although the poor fellow complacently chewed the bitter weed.

Professional anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the beliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the undergraduate. But you can't expect an ordinary adult man, like myself, to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents.

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