MY AUSTRALIAN GIRLHOOD.*

My .dastrulian Girlhood. By Kra. Campbell Pined. London: Fisher unwln. [leo, net.]

Fon over three centuries the great Southern land has fasci- nated in turn such .discoverers as Quiros, Torres, Tasman, Cook, and Flinders; such explorers as Grey, Torrens, Leichart, Wills, and Calvert ; such observers (from the Nature side) as Banks,- Cunningham, Gunther, and Darwin ; and (from the social side) such as Charles Reade, Marcus Clarke, and Henry Kingsley. But is this witchery all with the outsiders ? Has not the spell fallen on the children of the soil? The poems of Henry Kendall and Brunton Stephens and the novels of Mrs. Campbell Pined give a sufficiently convincing answer. And

in this handsome volume of two hundred and seventy pages by the last-named writer this feeling for her native land runs into an absorbing passion, and with it there is the gift and faculty of adequate and acceptable expression. Any one who has ever ridden a mile in the eerie gum-forest will recognise the accuracy, and even the poetry, of the following picture :— "I know nothing so strange in its way as to travel for days through endless gum-forest. Surely there never was a tree so weird as a very old gum, with its twisted trunk, the withes of grey moss which hang from its branches, and the queer protuber- ances upon its limbs in which wild bees 'hive. It was a great thing when we camped out if the black boys found and chopped down a sugar-bag' so that we could season our damper with native honey. A white gum has spotted, scaly bark; from a red 'iron-bark' the gum oozes and drops like congealed blood. Then see the odd, expectant way in which the tree will slant along the side of a ridge, and the human look of its dead arms, when it is one that has been 'rung' or blasted by lightning. There is nothing pretty about a gum-tree. It seems to belong to antediluvian nature."

One of the author's early homes was on the banks of the Brisbane River, in the "forties," when the city of the same name was yet to come. The "mansion" consisted of four huts built round a garden. As the lands increased these isolated buildings were joined by covered ways. Each hut consisted of two fair-sized rooms, with several crammed into the verandah. But the glory of the estate was the plantation which spread down in front of the house to the sea. Here is Mrs. Praed's description of her child playground :—

" For pure joy nothing comes up to a cane-field. Perhaps a grown-up person might find it a little difficult to walk in, but for child'it is paradise. The reeds inset overhead and rustle in the wind, making a chattering that would only mean fairy stories if one only knew the language. The tassels hang from the cob- sheaths, pale pink, mauve, and tender green glistening as though they were spun glass. The millet, when it is young, looks like a strange flower; the shoots of sugar cane are most toothsome, and sweeter than store goodies. Better than to walk is to lie at full length between two rows of canes, which meet again over one's body, and one can look up and seo the tassels flirting with one another, and the sunbeams shooting arrows through the leaves which make flickering sh:Idows till the whole baby wood seems alive." -

Leaving now the surroundings of man for man himself, our author shows that the squatters of the early Australian days were a brave, reckless set of men. Quick to love and as quick to hate, they were full of pluck and endurance, dauntless before danger, and ready for any emergency. Their adven- tures, escapes, and carouses would have furnished rich material for an Australian Lever. The country north of Sydney was an unexplored land. Little by little men like Wentworth sealed the ranges of the Blue Mountains and pushed forward into the unknown region, the Government offering extensive grants of land to the successful pioneers. These latter took with them a following of ticket-of-leave men, and even convicts, whom the Government lent for a specified term:—

"When the pioneer was about to start for a new country he would get his convicts together and talk to them after such, a fashion as this : Lads, we are going into the interior. If any of you jib at the job, let me know like men, and I'll turn you in and get others ; but if you stick to me I'll stick to you, and give you good rations and twenty pounds a year as long as you behave yourselves.' Very few did jib at the job, some of them showed true hero stuff, and many a one got in this way his ticket-of-leave, and ultimately his freedom."

We know very well that sooner or later—in this case very soon—we are brought face to faze with the aborigines of the country, and the inevitable struggle between the two races.

Mrs. Pined does not conceal her liking for the blacks of Queensland, with whom she came in contact in her first home in Naraigin. "Oh, yes," she says, "in the blacks' camp, as in the squatters' humpey, there are human affections and the common emotions which men and women and even beasts share. There, too, time gins mourn their mates, and the mothers their babies." Her own nurse was a black native named Billabong Jenny, by whom the young white child was occasionally taken to the black children's camp. This practice led to an early entanglement with a half-caste boy called

Ringo. Matters became so serious that an elopement was planned. But on going into the laws of marriage it was

discovered that Ringo, being a Cuppi, was bound to wed with a Dongai. The white girl, it seems, had the cooler head, for on being told that if the stealthy marriage took place both parties would be knocked on the head with a nulla-nulla and then eaten after a corroboree, she thought better of the matter, and broke off the engagement. But the young white Australian was determined to see a comboree, and under Billabong's guidance this is what she saw :—

"The black forms thread the flames, bending this way and that in rhythmic motion, and the maddened faces with distended eye- balls and glistening are the faces of demons. Now the chant becomes slow and mysterious, as if it were an invocation. There are three wild shouts, and four or five rude effigies of women, made of saplings and draped with red blankets, are dragged into the circus and stood upright. They are saluted with screams of horrible laughter, and the warriors, painted like skeletons, mock them with gestures of derision. Then the black forms thicken round them. They are thrown down, stamped upon, and beaten with nulla-nullas, and at last hurled upon the central bonfire. The boomerangs clash louder, the saturnalia is fiercer. But I feel faint and sick, for I am convinced a human sacrifice is about to be offered. and. I turn and See."

The writer firmly believes that this fearful orgie was a pantomimic rehearsal of an attack on some white man's station, and she deeply regrets that she did not muster courage and tell her parents of what she had seen the previous night in the camp of the blacks. As a matter of awful fact, this corroboree was the precursor of the fearful massacre known as the Hornet Bank tragedy, in which every white man, woman, boy, and child was murdered. From a captured black boy the whole story in ghastly detail was learnt, and of course a speedy and well-planned revenge decided on. The salient points of the reprisal are reproduced in a needlessly realistic piece of dramatised narrative ; but it is only fair to state that all through the book the writer's sympathies are strongly on the side of the aborigines, who were in nearly every case the sinned against rather than the sinning.. Mrs. Praed rightly says that had the Government of Queensland stepped in from the first with just and stringent regulations, much bitter feeling, and consequent bloodshed, would have been spared.

Just now, when Australian legislation is bearing hardly on the Melanesian Kanaka—eight thousand of them receiving notice to quit—it is refreshing to read Mrs. Praed's testimony to their worth and usefulness :—

"Of all," she writes, "Peter was the nearest to our hearts. He loved us dearly, and gave us his trust with a simple, child-like faith which made us feel that it would be better for us were we to cheat the wide-awake white man of his honest wage, than to betray a Kanaka's lightest confidence. Sympathy is to the Islander as the breath of his nostrils, but abuse and blame stupefy and may even kill him, for he dies when life has ceased to be pleasurable. Once teach a Kanaka to do a thing, and he will never shirk the doing of it, whether his master be present or absent. Be kind to him and he will interest himself in all you care for, and help you to his utmost capability."

There are in the book many excellent word-portraits of various characters with whom our author became acquainted during her twenty-two years' sojourn,—the German Baron, the French-Monseer Jacks, the stockman of Naraigin, to say nothing of Tombo, Ringo, and Salvation Jockey. But the neatest sketch of all is this cameo of the Dean and the gold- digger :— " The Dean inqu3red if it would be agreeable to hold a service. The community exchanged doubtful looks, and a red-faced shock- headed fellow stepped up not too graciously, Well, they wouldn't sty anything agen a prayer-meeting if the parson was to set on it, but they weren't used to long-coated gentlemen, hadn't seen one for ten years, didn't know if there was a Bible among 'em, atid on the whole—well, he thought they'd rather not if it was all equal.'" That is true to the life, as the present writer can testify. The service was held next evening, when in the best sense "all was equal," and the whole township turned out for it, and praised the tact of the Dean on the first occasion, and his common-sense sermon on the second.

We cannot lay down Mrs. Praed's attractive, though gossipy, book without noting her observation on the blend- ing of the races on the great island-continent. Some distinct type is already perceivable. "One of the most interesting things," says the author, "in the growth of a colony is the working of the race-leaven—Scotch, German, Irish, Saxon, with the intermingling of some stray representative of out- side nationalities—and to watch the formation of a new type, modified by climatic, physiological, and psychological condi- tions, upon which our great-grandchildren will be in a better position than we are to lay down theories. But all the same, even now, with only two or three generations to base opinions upon, one can begin to trace the evoluting process."