So terms were arranged. And soon then a combination of picked men of the Gunn-e-darr, Goonoo Goonoo, and Manilla tribes, ninety in number, set out to attack the Bundarra and Kingston in their own mountain haunts.

This fighting was both fierce and prolonged. Ilpara was killed by a spear through the throat. The Manilla chief, Mooti, was ambushed in a clump of heath scrub by two Bundarra warriors and tomahawked to death. The Red Chief’s combined force lost eighteen men killed and twenty wounded in the first fight. In the next fight the Bundarra lost their war chief, Kibbi, killed by the Red Chief’s spear as he raced across a flat to reach the cover of scrub.

This fighting ended in the defeat of the Bundarra and Kingston tribes with heavy loss of warriors, and loss by capture of thirty-four young women, and five boys and girls, besides a goodly number of women whom they had taken from the Goonoo Goonoo and Manilla in previous raids. The Red Chief insisted that these captive women should be returned before he would make peace.

In time the Red Chief built up the Gunn-e-darr tribe so that they could face the most powerful enemies with confidence. He never suffered a defeat, while in peace his tribe prospered as never before, enhancing the prophetic reputation of cunning old Nundoba the witchdoctor.

The Red Chief lived to be a very old man. The sorrow of his passing when he obeyed the call of Baia-me to his place in the skies was remembered in legend for as long as one solitary member of his tribe remained, just as old Bungaree has given it to us.

Thus lived and passed, the Red Chief.

He was buried under the big old box-tree by the Porcupine Ridges, near his beloved Mullibah Lagoon camp, which he had defended so well. And there his bones rested for many years, until long after the white man came. Little did he know that his bones would be dug up and, with what remained of the carvings on the box-tree stump, sent to the Sydney Museum.

It is well that the Red Chief, during all those long years that he thought and fought for and fiercely struggled to build up his beloved tribe so that it would last for ever, knew nothing of the future coming of the white man.

Only Baia-me knew that.

APPENDIX

UNDERSTANDING THE ABORIGINAL

Very, very few Australians indeed, probably barely a score, have ever come to a real knowledge of the Australian aboriginal. This is understandable, for from early settlement, in that antagonistic, forceful impact of the first settlers, advancing as rapidly increasing “civilizers” upon the scattered tribes of Stone Age men whose home was this isolated continent that we were so hungry to occupy, there was not the time, and but little inclination, for the “whites” to get to know the “blacks”.

Even the overlanders and settlers who lived all their lives in the back country never came to know the real aboriginal, as he never came to know us. He was not given time, anyway. To the inlanders, the aboriginal was either a “good nigger”, a “no-hoper”, a “bad nigger”, or a Myall, a wild bush black. He was a good boy, a bad boy, or a good-for-nothing, according to the degree in which he was willing to work, or not to work, or to be a “nuisance”.