Time slowly passed, and the old sergeant was ageing, too. It was fitting then, that young Stan Ewing, long after he had reached manhood, in the presence of the old sergeant and the old aboriginal, should receive this story he had long been curious to hear from the lips of the last of the tribe—but only after the very remnants of the tribe had faded away and old “King” Bungaree knew that he was going, too. Yes, just as the wind blows into dust the last stem of dried grass that was once upstanding and rich and green and “covered all the earth”—as the aboriginals believed they did, long before the white man came.

And now for Stan Ewing’s own written description of old Bungaree, the real teller of this tale.

At time of the digging up of the old chief’s grave there were only forty people in the Blacks’ Camp I take this from the notes my father made at the time. The majority were half-castes, but there were still a few full-bloods amongst them, mostly middle-aged or old. Bungaree was “king” of the tribe, but there is no Namoi River tribe at Gunnedah now.

Bungaree was a full-blooded aboriginal about seventy years old, and a very active man in his movements. He had a well-formed massive head. His face was large and round, enhanced greatly by a long and wide growth of beard that adorned it. His was a smiling face, given to hearty laughter. He was about five feet seven in height, a broad and deep chest, wide shoulders, good eyes, teeth, and hearing, with a decidedly poddy or Falstaffian stomach, while in talking to him one realized he was an intelligent man. Bungaree, from many years’ association with white people, could talk a very fair type of English. I have always found that the Australian aboriginal will quickly learn to talk a good class of English if you teach him, and talk that way to him.

So much for the teller of the tale. It would never have been told but for the professional interest and the curiosity of a hunter after relics. But let Stan Ewing carry on.

It all came about because of the Blackfellow’s Tree.

Even before 1865 the Black Fellow’s Tree was well known in the little township, very different then to the Gunnedah of today. The “tree” then was only a huge box-tree stump some twelve feet high, carved from base to top with intricate totemic designs, the work done by a stone tomahawk. The stump stood opposite the old Wesleyan Parsonage, well back from the roadside of Poe Street (later Abbot Street). All knew the stump as the burial site of some great aboriginal chief and warrior, the stump carved with his totemic designs when the tree was hale and hearty in the long-gone days when the tribe had its favourite camping site where Gunnedah is today. Numbers of white women for a Sunday afternoon stroll used to walk to the Blackfellow’s Tree. Even by 1865 it had weathered and been blown down and rotted and eaten to a shell by white ants. It was then only a twelve-foot stump. In that year Mr Arthur Turner, following tracks of his straying horses across Bloomfield Street, examined it. All around him then was virgin bush heavily timbered with box-trees, wilga, pine, belah, and patches of scrub. Big box-trees grew where the Wesleyan Church grounds are now.