If the reader has been patient enough to read so far this plodding explanation of the book it may help him understand the characters and subject a little better. And it may explain that the wild Australian aboriginal, though a true Stone Age man is not, and never has been, the brainless, brutal primitive that many of us believe him to be—I believed it myself for quite a time, though actually living amongst them. The wild aboriginal and his wife and youngsters have always been human beings very much like ourselves.

And now to the writer—and, I frankly admit, the not-too-expert writer—of this book. Perhaps the experiences of half a lifetime of wandering throughout vast portions of this continent during years when wild aboriginals were still numbered in thousands, and of being in intimate contact with them, should help me in writing a fairly accurate picture of this now vanished tribe. Thanks to the story of Bungaree, the understanding of the old sergeant, the painstaking notes of Stanley Ewing, and at that enthusiastic, dogged perseverance possessed by all those good folk who so painstakingly collect and treasure material from our past—in this case Russell McDonagh, who forced these notes upon me.

So here is the last corroboree to the Red Chief. I wish it were only worthy of the man he must have been.

POSTSCRIPT

As mentioned above, Stan Ewing and several of the old hands refer to the Red Chief’s skeleton, and part of the carved burial tree, as having been forwarded to the Museum in Sydney. My publishers and I were anxious to verify this, though we realized that it would be difficult to do so, since the objects would have been transported many years ago, during pioneering days in a very young and undeveloped country. We asked the Australian Museum if it would be possible to make a search.

Under considerable difficulties a search was made, but unfortunately it yielded no trace of the skeleton of the Red Chief. But the officials got very close, a remarkable achievement, considering the lapse of years and the very small, sparsely staffed, and struggling organization the Museum must have been at the time the skeleton was sent.

Here is an extract from the report the Australian Museum officials forwarded to my publishers:

The tree mentioned by Mr Idriess is listed in a Memoir (Geological Survey of N.S.W., Ethnological Ser. 3, 1918) on the Carved Trees of N.S.W., as 48 in the Taphoglyphs, and the following quotation is given on p. 50.

“48. Gunnedah, Liverpool Plains. The ‘City of the Dry Plains’, or the ‘Home of the Fatherless and Motherless’, as the name is said to imply in the Kamilaroi dialect. The grave of Cumbo Gunerah, by tradition a great old warrior of these parts at, or rather before, the white man’s arrival in Port Jackson, tradition says about 1745, was located, and traditional history collected by Dr Edward Hayne (Sydney Mail, 1891, No. 1622, Aug. 8th). ‘In front of the Wesleyan Church, and near the Courthouse, on the street crossing the main street of Gunnedah, stood a peculiarly-marked old stump. There was a boomerang cut on each side with a yeliman at the bottom. The tree seemed to have been down for years. The carvings were in the bark, but the second growth around it showed the growth of many years’ development in the tree since the engraver had been there.’ Cumbo appears to have been particularly successful in his attacks on the Coombri blacks about Terri-Hi-Hi and the Walleri or Big River blacks.”