Wunda, the pale-skinned spirit, was, amongst the aboriginals I knew, regarded as a very powerful spirit either for good or for evil—mostly for good. With the coming of the white man, I believe, the aboriginal belief that the white man was the Wunda spirit in reincarnated form became universal. Ridley and others found this belief in the south in the very early days. Many years later I—and of course other folk—found the same belief in our farthest north among still wild and semi-wild tribes.

The belief that Wunda, the white-skinned spirit was a force for good, great good, or evil, at times caused me to ponder whether this would be one cause for misunderstandings between black and white. In most areas the whites were greeted in friendly fashion, and experienced but little trouble in settlement amongst the blacks. In other areas there were suspicions and mutual misunderstandings, with, at times, immediate and brutal use of the gun by the whites or spear by the blacks. In such localities the aboriginals, of course, must have here believed that “Wunda” had come in a fury of evil, and they retaliated in the only way they knew. Had it not been for their superstitious fear of Wunda, greatly increased by the horses, the white men would not so easily have settled Australia.

It is interesting to remember the closely similar belief among the vastly more cultured people of those fascinating civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas. There, too, the white man was believed to be a spirit, a son of the Sun, unconquerable in his reincarnated spirit form, with his “thunder weapons” of fire and death. And his horse was a part of him, as Australian aboriginals believed. Had it not been for such beliefs Cortes and Pizarro, with their puny handful of Spaniards, would never have conquered the Aztec and Inca armies of Mexico and Peru.

A Side-light on Totemism

The “destruction of totemism” by the whites in later years brought, in many instances, violent retaliation from the Australian aboriginals. And the whites utterly failed to realize the true reason why. They believed it to be “bloodthirsty hostility” on the part of the blacks, little realizing that when they themselves ruthlessly slaughtered animals, birds, and trees, or polluted sacred waterholes with their stock, they were “killing” part of the deep inner life of the aboriginal, some of his most sacred beliefs. For any of the tens of thousands of rotting animal carcasses left where they fell all over the continent meant to the aboriginal not only criminal waste of precious food, but in that decaying remnant of bones might be his father, his mother or brother or sister or baby, that had come back to earth reincarnated, only to be needlessly slain by the “white devil, Wunda”. The early settlers, of course, could not know that many and many a tree they chopped down was sacred to the aboriginals as a totem, or as the abiding place of spirit babies awaiting their chance to enter a native mother to be born again. The destruction of such a sacred tree or grove meant to the local tribe that the abiding place of future babies for their tribe was gone for ever. Little wonder that in their bewilderment, rage, and despair they sometimes retaliated in the only way they knew, by killing any white man they could.