perth from king’s park. i can never look down on the panorama of that young and lovely city from the natural parkland on the crest of mount eliza that is its crowning glory without a vision of the past, the dim and timeless past when a sylvan people wandered its woods untrammelled, with no care or thought for yesterday or tomorrow, or of a world other than their own. scarcely a hundred years have passed since that symmetry of streets and suburbs was a pathless bushland, a tangle of trees and scrub and swamp with the broad blue ribbon of river running through it, widening from a thread of silver at the foot of the ranges to the estuary marshes and the sea.
through it all, a kangaroo skin slung carelessly over his shoulders, a few spears in his hand, strode the first landlord, catching fish in the river-shallows, spearing the emu and the kangaroo, and finding the roots and fruits that were his daily bread. his women and children meekly followed, carrying his spare weapons, their own household gods, and perhaps a baby swung in the kangaroo-skin bag. every spring and gully, every quaintly distorted tree, every patch of red ochre or white pipe-clay was his landmark, and every point, hill, valley, slope or flat from the river’s source to its mouth had its name. simple in his needs in a land of plenty, knowing none other than the age-old laws of life, and mating, and death, that have been his through the unreasoning centuries, he was a barbarian, but his lot was happy. as far as humans can, he lived in perfect amity with his fellows.
for hundreds of miles about him the people of the country were all his kindred, and the campfires dotting the river-flats, and the ranges, and the sea-coasts, and the great timber-forests were fires of friendliness.
as i dream, the red glow of those fires of fancy grows hard and cold and yellow, regular as the street-lights of a city, and the ranges beyond them are lost in the shadow-even as the last of their people. of the songs that rang to the stars in the far-off time there is no echo. the black man survived the coming of the white for little more than one lifetime. when captain stirling landed on the coast in 1829, he computed the aboriginal population of what he had marked out as the metropolitan area at 1,500 natives. in 1907 we buried joobaitch, last of the perth tribe.
