Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

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       THE COMING OF THE DINGOES

      ALTHOUGH that northern part of the Continent of Australia which is called Capricornia was pioneered long after the southern parts, its unofficial early history was even more bloody than that of the others. One probable reason for this is that the pioneers had already had experience in subduing Aborigines in the South and hence were impatient of wasting time with people who they knew were determined to take no immigrants. Another reason is that the Aborigines were there more numerous than in the South and more hostile because used to resisting casual invaders from the near East Indies. A third reason is that the pioneers had difficulty in establishing permanent settlements, having several times to abandon ground they had won with slaughter and go slaughtering again to secure more. This abandoning of ground was due not to the hostility of the natives, hostile enough though they were, but to the violence of the climate, which was not to be withstood even by men so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of Empire.

      The first white settlement in Capricornia was that of Treachery Bay—afterwards called New Westminster—which was set up on what was perhaps the most fertile and pleasant part of the coast and on the bones of half the Karrapillua Tribe. It was the resentment of the Karrapilluas to what probably seemed to them an inexcusable intrusion that was responsible for the choice of the name of Treachery Bay. After having been driven off several times with firearms, the Tribe came up smiling, to all appearances unarmed and intending to surrender, but dragging their spears along the ground with their toes. The result of this strategy was havoc. The Karrapilluas were practically exterminated by uncomprehending neighbours into whose domains they were driven. The tribes lived in strict isolation that was rarely broken except in the cause of war. Primitive people that they were, they regarded their territorial rights as sacred.

      When New Westminster was for the third time swept into the Silver Sea by the floods of the generous Wet Season, the pioneers abandoned the site to the crocodiles and jabiroos and devil-crabs, and went in search of a better. Next they founded the settlement of Princetown, on the mouth of what came to be called the Caroline River. In Wet Season the river drove them into barren hills in which it was impossible to live during the harsh Dry Season through lack of water. Later the settlements of Britannia and Port Leroy were founded. All were eventually swept into the Silver Sea. During Wet Season, which normally lasted for five months, beginning in November and slowly developing till the Summer Solstice, from when it raged till the Equinox, a good eighty inches of rain fell in such fertile places on the coast as had been chosen, and did so at the rate of from two to eight inches at a fall. As all these fertile places were low-lying, it was obviously impossible to settle on them permanently. In fact, as the first settlers saw it, the whole vast territory seemed never to be anything for long but either a swamp during Wet Season or a hard-baked desert during the Dry. During the seven months of a normal Dry Season never did a drop of rain fall and rarely did a cloud appear. Fierce suns and harsh hot winds soon dried up the lavished moisture.

      It was beginning to look as though the land itself was hostile to anyone but the carefree nomads to whom the Lord gave it, when a man named Brittins Willnot found the site of what came to be the town of Port Zodiac, the only settlement of any size that ever stood permanently on all the long coastline, indeed the only one worthy of the name of town ever to be set up in the whole vast territory. Capricornia covered an area of about half a million square miles. This site of Willnot’s was elevated, and situated in a pleasantly unfertile region where the annual rainfall was only about forty inches. Moreover, it had the advantage of standing as a promontory on a fair-sized navigable harbour and of being directly connected with what came to be called Willnot Plateau, a wide strip of highland that ran right back to the Interior. When gold was found on the Plateau, Port Zodiac became a town.

      The site of Port Zodiac was a Corroboree Ground of the Larrapuna Tribe, who left the bones of most of their number to manure it. They called it Mailunga, or the Birth Place, believing it to be a sort of Garden of Eden and apparently revering it. The war they waged to retain possession of this barren spot was perhaps the most desperate that whitemen ever had to engage in with an Australian tribe. Although utterly routed in the first encounter, they continued to harass the pioneers for months, exercising cunning that increased with their desperation. Then someone, discovering that they were hard-put for food since the warring had scared the game from their domains, conceived the idea of making friends with them and giving them several bags of flour spiced with arsenic. Nature is cruel. When dingoes come to a waterhole, the ancient kangaroos, not having teeth or ferocity sharp enough to defend their heritage, must relinquish it or die.

      Thus Civilisation was at last planted permanently. However, it spread slowly, and did not take permanent root elsewhere than on the safe ground of the Plateau. Even the low-lying mangrove-cluttered further shores of Zodiac Harbour remained untrodden by the feet of whitemen for many a year. It was the same with the whole maritime region, most of which, although surveyed from the sea and in parts penetrated and occupied for a while by explorers, remained in much the same state as always. Some of the inhabitants СКАЧАТЬ