The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1902-12-07

more than one Australian castaway. Per-
haps in the case of Barbara Thompson
which no doubt suggested the most power
full of the late Grant Aliens short stories
the native belief in reincarnation was not
an altogether welcome means of salvation.
One can well imagine a delicately brought
up young girl. preferring to die rather than
become the wife of Boroto, her black res
cuer. But Pinguai, an ancient brave, de-
clared her to be the ghost Of his dead
daughter, Giom, and so Barbara was taken
to the bosom of the tribe, learned the
blacks language, which she spoke f1uently
conformed to their customs, and bare chill
dren to her dusky spouse, wandering with
him and his brethren for nearly five years.
when she was rescued and taken back to
her parents in Sydney. Imagination
shrinks before the horror which that five
years interlude of savagery must have i'm
ported into Barbara Thompson's life. That
was not so long ago, nor was the rescue Of
Murrell whom / remember being lionized in
Brisbane when he was brought into civil
ization after seventeen years Of nomadic
existence with the blacks. Murrell had
been shipwrecked and reached the coast
with small party Of survivors from the
grisly experience of forty days upon
raft, when a shark, baited with the limb of
dead comrade, provided the wretched
party with food. A white woman and her
husband were cast away with Murrell, and
the blacks hailed the three as spirits of the
tribe, Jumped up white fellow" according
to the formula, and danced corroborees
round them, and fed them and handled
them as though they had been new toys.
Some of the natives would have carried
away the woman, had not the white men
bought her off by giving UP their clothing
and knives to the blacks Poor Mrs. Pit
kethly-that was her name. She endured
her lot for two years. Her husband died
first, and death mercifully released her four
days later.
BUSH SUGGESTIONS.
Bush romance tends to the tragic. 1t is
elemental, terrible, grotesque An Aus
tralian sculptress spoke to me once of fix
ing in marble the genius of the bush. In
what guise should he be represented? To
my thinking as a grand monster with
beautiful human head and limbs uncouth,
embryonic, even revolting-a being fasci-
mating, mysterious, abnormal, with the sad,
wild eyes of one who has gazed since the
OSSiAhAS VI SicdliO.i upOh SlIdHSe lHiuSS.
How else embody a spirit of the bush who
would be in harmony with the desolation
Of this wilderness-with the gaunt, twisted
gum trees, the lightning blasted rocks, the
great, queer grass tufts with blackened
stems and giant spikes like specimens of
some primeval growth, the gloomy scrubs,
the lonely water holes Swallowed by leprous
she oaks, the huge gorges riven in prehis-
toric cataclysms, the vast plains over which
Drought, the specter, always hovers. chang
ing them into arid deserts? What place
would there be here for graceful Dread,
merry Faun or the good old piping Pan?
Debil-debil and the Bunyip come nearer
to the mark as tutelary divinities of the
bush.
/ never saw the Bunyip, but / have met
people who said they had. though they
could give no satisfactory description OF
this legendary monster; and have i'm men,
DRY lagoons which no black would swim
across and where even bullock drivers with
their teams preferred not to choose their
camping ground
AS for Debil-debil. his shapes are various
Sometimes ne is a bird, never seen. but ut
tering doleful wall which has the effect
of clearing from the spot all black human
ity. Or he is a fire god, fierce and vengeful,
sending madness upon those dwelling in thu,