SHORT STORY

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 64, 7 June 1927, Page 3

SHORT STORY

THE STRONGER LAW AN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL!

By

James M. Devaney.

It had been a sad season for the wandering Waringa tribe, a year of want and hardship the longest dry spell within the memory of the oldest pinnaroos. Kolin, the rainmaker of the Waringas, had vainly lit his ceremonial fires and chanted his magic rain songs, especially when clouds came up out of the south and when the moon was yellow; but the promise always had passed away and the land grew ever more bare, and the cunning Kolin blamed the strong wizards of the false coastal tribes. The wallaroo disappeared from the wooded ridges, and the kangaroo from the bare brown plains; the well-known waterholes, once with the cod and the blackfish, and loud day and night with the scream of waterfowl, dried up and disappeared. It was a time of hunger and fear, but most of all feared Wiriri, the wife of Boolabai, for their child Roona was a cripple, and a growing burden on the camp. Roona, the laughing-eyed girl of seven summers, when only a toddling birrahlee, had one night of storm and terror been crushed by a falling bough, and had never walked; but she had been ever the laugh ter-bringer, the prettiest of the Waringa children, the plaything of the camps, the pet of the lubras, the favourite of all. Laughter and play had now long gone from the evening fires of the wandering Waringas, for many a time the hunters came in silent and weary, bringing no food at all. Many were the dark glances bent upon the girl Roona, for the tribal laws were well known. Had not Kootchibarra, the headman’s own baby, been left behind on a sheet of bark in a similar famine time many seasons past; and had not the elders of the tribe once decreed that ancient Tulkeri, too old any longer to be carried about from camp to camp, should be left behind at last in the bush with a bark yorli of water? These things had been done and were remembered, for such was the law and the custom of the Waringas; but still the girl Roona was borne with them on their wanderings, and given her share of the scanty food. At last, one cloudless evening, when the weary hunters returned again empty-handed, and flung down their clattering spears, the elders of the tribe sat apart around their council fire, while Wiriri crouched and cried over her whimpering child, the crippled Roona. The lubras squatted together in the gunyas, and whispered, Boolabai, coming in last from the hunt with empty hands, sat silent beside his breakwind of gunv boughs, and watched the pinnaroos. Even across the width of the camp they could hear the angry voice of Kolin the rainmaker: “Must we starve for a cripple, wasting what food there is?” and again: “Our fathers decreed it —the cripple must go.”

So it was agreed, and next morning old Kootchibarra, the weak headman of the Waringas, told J:he assembled camp the thing that had been decided by the elders, that the girl Roona nld no longer come with them. Bitterly then Wiriri cursed the pinnaroos and the headman, and loudly reviled Kolin, the false rainmaker, who brought no rain. Vainly she begged to be allowed to stay in the abandoned camp with the lost one, and bitterly she blamed the passivity of Boolabi, her husband, who laid the dumb and wide-eyed Roona in a ’possum rug by the little fire, with the last of their yams beside her. “It is the custom; our fathers have told us so,” said Boolabai.

“Wah! It is but a woman’s easy tongue,” said Kolin.

So the helpless Roona was left behind in the little clearing, and after many good-byes and much wailing Wiriri with a stricken heart took up her dillybag and her man’s weapons, and went with the rest. All that day the tribe followed the dry bed of the river now filled with hot, water-worn stones, and at night made c.mp at the Long Waterhole, now but a few linked pools, about the shrunken margins of which lay the bleaching bones of animals which had come to drink and been too weak to depart again to feed. Here the men caught golden perch and jewfish, and Boolabai brought in a wallaby which he speared in the scrub.

Great was the rejoicing in the gunyas, but Wiriri’s heart was ever away with her child in the far-off clearing, left to the kites and the dingoes, the flies and the ants. The women of the camp came to weep with her. and offer comfort, saying: “It is the law ol* the men-folk; it has happened often and you will forget.” But when darkness fell at last, and there was no sound about the sleeping camp save only the double hoot of the mopoke in the tall river-gums, and the famished whine of the dingo on the distant rise, Wiriri lay alert till the fires burned low and every wakeful star had ceased. Then, with food wrapped in soft ti-tree bark, she arose and glided into the scrub like a shadow, carrying no fire stick to ward off evil Malian, the hairless red devil of the scrubs; for love is stronger than fear. It was many hours' walk back to the clearing, and Wiriri was faint with grief and famine, but as the great moon rose red in the north-east about midnight she came to the scrub’s edge and there stood astonished.

Murmuring voices reached her, and then, peering through the stunted banksias and brigalow, she saw by the little fire the form of her man, Boolabai, holding Roona, and to her as of old, while he fed her with fish wrapped in leaves, brought, from the camp at the Long Waterhole. He heard the rustle at the edge of clearing, and sprang to his feet with long spear readied in the wommera, till with a glad cry Wiriri stumbled forward into the moonlight. They cried together over their lost one, lying in the ’possum rug, and soothed and fondled her, till the moon stood clear above the sighing bloodwoods, and Wamba, the Mad Star, had disappeared in the west. Then said Boolabai: “Th~ laws of the Waringas are old, but older still is - love of child and mother that will not be parted. Two camps away in the south I know wells and waterholes in the great mountain country of e river blacks, the tall Munoora people. We will leave our people and the brown desert country, where Kootchibarra is weak and old. and Kolin the rainmaker has lost his magic. They will lead no vengeance party while fish are caught in the Long Waterhole, and we will leave no tracks in the brigalow. We will follow south the flight of the summer swallow, and when the rains come again, filling the scrubs with game and the rivers with waterfowl, Roona, our sick one, will sit and playbefore the gunya.” So they brought stout green sticks, and fashioned the litter with the ’possum rug upon it, and there laid Roona. And, carrying her, they 7 headed through the dawn-awakening bush toward the great south country 7 of the tall Munoora people. —“The Australasian.”