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Updated: June 26, 2025
Less than a mile beyond where Breaden had turned back we came on the biggest camp of natives we had seen quite a village! Perhaps a dozen little "wurlies" or branch-shelters were dotted about the foot of a sandhill. Camped under them we found one buck, several gins, and numerous picaninnies; it was clear that more were not far off.
The white man was indeed a devil, for how else could he have found a little bone stuck in the sand on a dark night? In an instant the fire was deserted. The frightened natives crouched behind wurlies and breakwinds, dreading least the white man should point that deadly bone at them. But Stobart swung it by its hair string till it was over the hottest part of the fire and then let it drop.
It was all so far away that he wasn't sure that he had seen correctly, so he answered with hesitation; "It looks as if there were people in those bushes. They don't live there, do they, Peter?" "They're not bushes," explained the man. "They're what we call 'wurlies'. They're sort of little huts the blacks live in.
You'll see quite enough of them before you've been in this country long, I promise you." The boys wanted to go over at once and see, so Peter good-naturedly went with them. The wurlies were made from branches pulled from the ragged trees which grew around, and stuck in the sand with their tops brought together. This framework was covered with bits of old bag or blanket.
Then Prue spoke out the fear which Mollie had not understood: "The blacks have come to town; I saw their wurlies yesterday when we left the Gardens." "Away wid ye, Miss Prudence," Bridget scoffed. "An' what for wud the blacks be touchin' Grizzel? Isn't yur Pa the kindest gintleman in the whole wurrld to thim, dirrty things they be!"
The lad would have dashed across the open space at once, but Coiloo pulled him behind a rock. A terrible tragedy was about to be enacted in front of that cluster of sordid wurlies. The dead body of Wuntoo lay out naked on the sand. At the head of it stood Stobart, bound hand and foot, and clad in nothing but his tattered trousers. He was about to die.
The camp where the drover was obliged to live consisted of thirty or forty wurlies on the side of a little hill above a spring. The dwellings were temporary and primitive, as blacks' dwellings are: branches stuck into the ground and drawn together at the top to make a shape like an inverted bowl.
He dropped his spears and got ready. A fire was burning in front of him. With a few lighted sticks he could set the camp ablaze. He imagined the wurlies roaring up to heaven, while he, a captive white man, mad with rage, ran shouting through the crowd, dealing out death with every blow of his boomerang. Not one of the natives suspected what he was going to do.
The woman and child whom Vaughan had seen from the distance had run away like startled rabbits as the white men came up, and the camp of six or seven wurlies seemed deserted except for this one miserable specimen of humanity.
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