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[Page 180]
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ILLUSTRATIONS OF ABORIGINAL LIFE AND CHARACTER.
sent to "disperse" them. Poor little Ippai hid himself in the prickly scrub; and from his hiding-place saw the black police cut off with their swords the heads of men and women; he did not then know what the swords were, having never seen anything like them; he also saw these policemen take up little children by their feet and dash their brains out against the trees. That is the way British authority has been enforced in many cases by the black police–a force armed for the maintenance of the peace.
As an instance of the way in which power is sometimes transferred among the tribes, Mr. Honery related the following incident:–A king or chief on the Barwan having sent his wife away for a time, when she came back with a baby he said it was not his, and beat her; he then killed the baby by driving a tomahawk into its head. The woman's brother coming up, and seeing what was done, speared the chief and killed him. Then the tribe, finding their chief killed, attacked the slayer; but on his telling what had taken place, some took part with him. In a fight, he and his partisans overpowered the avengers of the late chief, and having thus shown his superior prowess, he was recognised by the tribe as their king. He was well known to the colonists as "Wyaburra Jackey."
The people about the junction of the Hunter and the Iris give this account of the origin of Rivers:-Some blackfellows were travelling in search of water, and were very thirsty. One of them, with a tomahawk, cut a tree, in which there was a gulagūr (opossum's hole), and a stream flowed out which became a river.
The same people tell of a chief who sent some of his men to strip bark. They came back and told him they could not get any. These men had broken the laws, and for their sin a terrible storm came down upon them. The chief then took a tomahawk and stripped off a sheet of bark; he told his men to get under it. They said it was not large enough. Then he stretched it, and made it longer and broader. At last they all consented to go under it; he threw it down and killed them all.
The following vision of an aboriginal woman of the Wodi-wodi tribe was related to me by her niece, Mrs. Malone (half-caste):–Mary Ann (by that name the aboriginal woman was known to the colonists) fell into a trance and remained for three days motionless. At the end of that time Mrs. Malone's uncle let off a gun which awoke her out of the trance. She then told her friends that she had seen a long path, with fire on both sides of it. At the end of this path stood her father and mother, waiting for her. As she went on they said to her "Mary Ann, what brought you here?" She said "I don't know; I was dead." Her mother, whom she saw quite plain, said "You go back." And she woke.