15 July 1937

ONE GOOD TURN DESERVES ANOTHER

How An Aborigine Repaid A Kindness

Age does not deal kindly with the personal appearance of the Australian native, and Old Micky was no exception to the rule. His once splendid teeth had degenerated into a few black stumps; he never washed, and as a result he had the complaint referred to nowadays as 'B.O.' in its most acute form. Both to eye and nose his presence was an offence.

Almost the last of his tribe, he roamed the former hunting grounds of his people, going bush at intervals, but always finding his way back to the station homesteads or the township, there to catch food and tobacco until ordered to move elsewhere. He was always accompanied by two or three lean-ribbed, flea-tormented dogs.

One day Old Micky noticed that numbers of strangers were busy on the former hunting grounds of his people; white fellows who cut long, straight lines through the scrub with axes and slashers, at the direction of a boss who was always looking through a thing which stood on three legs. He made for their camp, but the surveyors tersely bade him to clear out.

Later, other white men who were strangers came to drive or ride over the surveyed country, examining the grassy flats and waterholes. But they, too, would have nothing to do with him. 'Get out of it, you stinking old brute,' was his usual reception. Seldom, indeed, was he given anything in the shape of tucker; few were the fills of tobacco handed to him.

There was one exception, however, a young couple who arrived in a spring cart. A few days previously Old Micky had cut his foot badly on a broken bottle while scrounging on the site of an abandoned camp; dirt had inflamed the wound badly. When he limped up to where the young couple were camped the woman noticed the ugly gash on his foot. Heedless of her husband's advice to have nothing to do with him, she bade the native sit down and then looked at the cut. With water poured from a billy-can and soap she cleaned the gnarled and scarred foot, poured a little carbolic into the wound, and then bound it up with the deft neatness of one who had been trained as a nurse.

'You'd do as much for a dog or a horse,' she told her husband. 'So let me do something for a human being.' Old Micky found that the carbolic and the washing made his foot feel better, although it stung like fire at first, and afterwards he was told to sit down wind from the camp and was handed a big slab of damper and cold meat, with hot, sweet tea in a jam tin. Not to be outdone, the man gave him half a plug of sweet smoking tobacco.

Old Micky took the gifts with grunted thanks, then sat smoking and listening as they talked. He gathered that the land which had been recently surveyed was now being thrown open by the Government for selection, and that this young couple wanted to get one of the blocks.

These white fellows were queer people, he reflected; his people were content for the tribe to own a whole area, over which each member could hunt and roam at will, but the whites must each own their particular piece of ground, on which everything belonged to them alone. And they were ridiculously touchy about smells— always wrinkling their noses when he came near, and making him sit down wind from them, so they could not smell him. It never seemed to occur to them that they smelled strongly to him, too; their own odor was just like that of a sheep to him. Still, they had been kind to him; it occurred to him that he might be able to help them.

'Water no good here. Boss,' he remarked. 'What's that?' the man replied. 'What's wrong with it?' 'That pfeller dry up,' the old native replied, indicating the nearby water hole with his filthy old pipe-stem. He pointed in the direction of the adjoining blocks, and added, 'That pfeller dry, too. My cripes. Boss, plurry water dry up allabout.'

The young couple looked at each other, then at their plan of the district. It showed the waterholes as permanent. The man told the native what the plan said, but he shook his head. 'All these pfeller go dry,' he repeated. The woman broke the silence which followed by saying, 'How did your people get on when there was no water, then,' Old Micky pointed to a low range of hills. 'Plenty water sit down,' he replied. 'Mine show 'em.'

He rose to his feet and the young couple followed; half an hour later their dusky guide halted at the foot of a low cliff and pointed to a few rushes. 'Water sit down allatime,' he said. The man parted the rushes and saw a tiny puddle of water. 'Only a billy can full,' he growled. By way of reply, Old Micky pulled the rushes away and pointed to the rock; to his eye the smooth, worn sur face of it was eloquent of the in numerable furred and feathered creatures which came there to drink in time of drought, but the silly white fellows were blind, it seemed; their faces showed plainly that they could not understand.

He tried to explain; it was the woman who understood first. 'I see what he means, Jack,'' she cried. 'There has been a run of good seasons, and so nothing comes here to drink; the other waterholes have been full for years. But when there's a drought everything has to come here, and that rock has been worn smooth by the kangaroos and emus.'

The man stooped to look closer, then his eyes fell to the well-worn pad which led to it, nearly obliterated by drift and grass, but still discernible. While he was looking at it the old native thrust a hand under the shelf of rock and brought it out with the palm full of clear water. 'Good feller,' he said, as he drank it.

The white man lay down and stared into the cleft, then exclaimed, 'Why, here's a regular little waterfall in there, running down a gutter in the rock. Most of it disappears down a crack— this little soak in front is only what splashes out. I reckon that if that crack was blocked up, all the water would run out here. Let's see if we can stuff that crack up with clay or something.'

They blocked the crack without trouble; before long an ever-widening pool was forming at their feet. The woman turned to the old native. 'You're sure there's always water in there?' she demanded. 'My plurry oath, Missus,' he replied. 'Water finish allabout, we camp here.'

The young couple hastily removed the clay plugging from the crack, obliterated all signs of the pool, told the old native to show it to no other white people, and left to apply for the country around the spring. They were granted it; it was one of the least attractive blocks from a grazing point of view, for much of it consisted of stony ridges, and nobody else had applied for it. As soon as they took possession they got to work on the spring with, a sack of cement and some sand; as soon as the crack was blocked completely a little creek began to form. It is still running to day.

Neighboring blockers had a bad time in the years which followed. One by one the supposed permanent waterholes went dry ; all of them were waterless in the 1914 drought, and most of the bores which were sunk either struck meagre supplies or water too salt for stock. But the spring under the rock has never failed.

Old Micky has been dead for years. The young couple who took up the block are now grandparents, and it was a white-haired woman who will never see sixty again who told me the above story. Then she took me out to show me the spring, whose water nowadays runs down a concrete channel to a storage tank, from which pipe-lines convey it to all the paddocks, and then led me out to where a little plot has been fenced in with a wall of stones.

'Micky was found dead in his camp over at the five-mile gate,' she explained, 'and Jack and I had him brought here and buried. While he was alive we kept him in food and clothes, with two sticks of tobacco a week. He was a filthy old thing, you know, but if it hadn't been for him we wouldn't be in the position we are today.'— 'Bogaduck.'

Fire That Could Not Be Foreseen

A small country town possessed a live-wire insurance agent and the nucleus of a water conservation and reticulation system. But the activity of the former was hampered by the inactivity of the local councillors, who kept insurance premiums up higher than need be by their dilatory attitude towards the completion of the water scheme.

In the end the dam was finished towards the middle of spring, instead of at the beginning of winter, as planned, with the result that the copious winter rains were wasted for conservation purposes. A shade dubiously, the head office of the insurance company gave its agent permission to adjust rates to the fire brigade protection level, while the local lads trained strenuously with hose and hand-truck.

Unfortunately the townspeople be came bitten so badly with a desire for gardening, which many of them had vainly cherished in their breasts for years, that they practically ran the dam dry in a few weeks. What was left of the supply was hurriedly pumped up into a storage tank outside the town on a hill, in case of fire, and the supply was cut off until further rains.

One night an old weatherboard cottage on this outskirts of the town caught fire and was burned to cinders, complete with contents inside ten minutes. When the fire-brigade arrived, the firemen found it hard to resist the temptation to drown the ashes with water, and the reticulation engineer was requested to turn supplies on.

Immediately the news got around, the sightseers hurriedly bolted home to water their gardens while the going was good, under the cover of darkness. So heavy was the consumption that the fire-fighters could only raise a dribble from their big hose. The engineer tore off to the main cock with the speed of an athlete, but he was too late to do any good. The storage tank was quite empty. The fire-brigade dried out its hose, rolled it up neatly and put it away in its shed, with the truck, until such time as rain fell and there might be use for it again.

Thereupon an epidemic of fires fell upon the town. Very few new buildings suffered, but anything that was old and weather-beaten seemed to develop a magnetic and fatal attraction for sparks which once would have deluged it without making any impression. For the first week or two people turned out to watch the fun the minute they heard the school bell ringing to signal an outbreak; but fires eventually became so common that a man would merely put his head out of the door to see if it were either of his neighbors' places that happened to be alight, and if not, promptly go back to bed.

The insurance agent tore his hair and found himself compelled to refuse some fine business from nervous clients, as his company declined to insure any more buildings until the water service was in operation again, after the first three or four claims had been sent in.

A strange fact became evident in the offices of the investigators when they came to collate the reports of the assessors sent to examine the damage. While there were one or two houses which belonged to other persons, the bulk of the misfortune seemed to be landing on the head of one large landlord, who throve increasingly upon his distress and blessed the foresight which had led him to insure all his property.

But one night the fine new bungalow in which this unlucky man lived went up in smoke in the twinkling of an eye. All his effects were lost, and he bewailed his lot to the insurance agent. 'What a pity, it was,' remarked the agent, 'that you insured everything else you had and forgot to take out a policy over your own home.' 'You're quite right,' admitted the victim, 'and I will never be caught that way again; how on earth could a man be expected to anticipate a thing like this happening?' — 'Warrigal.'

Tragedy Of The Ketch Ruby

When the ketch Ruby left Salt Creek, Yorke Peninsula, on a Sunday morning in late July, 1890, she was destined to write into the maritime history of South Australia a chapter of mystery which still remains unsolved. She left on her ill-fated trip against the advice of many, heavily laden with salt and with her plimsol dipping under the leaden sea.

The Ruby was in the charge of Captain Jelly, who had had years of experience with light craft of her type and who knew the coastal waters as he knew the palm of his hand. He was a seaman admired and respected by his associates and a popular figure among the residents of Yorke Peninsula, where he was well known. His one fault as a seaman appears to have been a reckless habit of over loading his craft— a habit which finally resulted in the loss of his own life and of the lives of the two men who accompanied him on the disastrous trip.

The Ruby was last seen off Stansbury at 3 o'clock on the Sunday afternoon, and subsequent enquiries made along the coast by the harbormaster at Edithburg brought no results. That night the weather became very rough and the wind strengthened to almost a gale. Masters of vessels were requested to keep a look out for the Ruby, and it was suggested that the gunboat Protector be sent out in an attempt to locate the ketch. That vessel, however, had been docked for repairs, and finally the steam cutter Victoria carried out a thorough search, but no trace of the ketch was found, and it seemed certain that she had sunk with all hands.

Adelaide was then shaken by the circulation of a rumor that Mr. H. Bartlett, M.P., was on board the Ruby. Mr. Bartlett, who owned property near Stansbury, was in the habit of spending the week-end there and was to have made the return trip on the ill-fated ketch. It was subsequently reported that his body had been found on the coast, but fears we're allayed when Mr. Bartlett was discovered to be in bed at the Woodman Hotel, in Grenfell street, suffering from a severe cold — a cold which probably saved his life.

In September, 1890, chairs and some wreckage supposed to have belonged to the Ruby were washed ashore on the Peninsula coast, but their identity remained a matter for conjecture.

No more was heard of ketch or crew until August 31, 1891, when the first definite proof of her wreck was discovered by Mr. H. W. Thompson, of Port Adelaide. While strolling along the beach about a quarter of a mile south of Hallett's Cove, he found a ship's side fender with the name Ruby carved deeply into it. That scrap of wreckage formed the only clue as to the fate of the ship. — F.C.