SOOSIE 149 



cassowary chick, neat dilly-bags, gay with crude pig- 

 ments, were brought to the house with messages such 

 as this : 



"That fella 'Pad-oo-byer' he bin gib'em alonga 'Ky- 

 ee-rah.' " 



"Ky-ee-rah " (the evening star) had been proclaimed 

 to be Soosie's totemic name, and "Pad-oo-b^^er " we 

 knew as "Duckbill," because of a fancied resemblance 

 to a platypus. 



The gifts were tearfully repudiated. They seemed 

 to announce that Soosie was regarded by her mother's 

 kin as one of themselves, notwithstanding her civilised 

 environment. 



Though for the girl's sake, not on account of any 

 personal repugnance or despiteful attitude, the blacks 

 had been kept at arm's-length, I was on good terms with 

 all in the district, and took interest in their doings and 

 folk-lore. One of their primary beliefs was that children, 

 black and white, were actually the produce of the locality, 

 belonging, not to chance parents, but to the very land 

 on which they were born. The germs of life, they 

 assumed, came from the soil; the soil assimilated all 

 flesh after death. Infants were but phases of the life 

 with which the soil teemed. All the neighbourhood 

 belonged to the camp— the land and everything which 

 sprang from it, for they were the original possessors. 

 It was their country. They argued that such things 

 as sweet potatoes, pumpkins and mangoes, the very 

 roses which adorned a sprawling bush, the richly tinted 

 crotons, the flaunting alamanda over the gateway, 

 were, strictly speaking, common property. So, too, 

 over those children born on the place certain proprietary 

 rights were claimed. They were akin to them, alien 

 to their parents. Whites and blacks born in the same 

 district must, according to their ideas, be more closely 



