As each group came and went, it left me the legacy of its derelicts. Veiled from the flies-and the flies of the Ooldea mallee in the summer season are a monotony of torture-I threaded the camps in some miles of difficult sand-walking, with the day’s provisions slung over my shoulder in calico bags. The frocks I distributed to the new arrivals were frequently burned in a night from ignorance or carelessness at the sleeping fires. The food would be shared with all who laid claim to it. There was a terrible instance of this in Ngannana, a woman who came in with six or seven men, all naked and very primitive. I showed her how to make a damper and gave her a bag of flour. Next day I found her savagely mutilated, and learned that the men who could lawfully do so had taken all the food from her. When her great hulking son had come in to find none spared for him, his fiendish revenge was the act of a wild animal.

When Mooja-Moojana’s mob came in, some semi-civilized relatives showed the man a tomahawk. It was such a vast improvement upon his old flint yabu that Mooja felt its edge in wonderment, kept it near him as a treasure, and when his woman returned from the day’s reptile hunting, almost cleft her buttock in two as an experiment. I confiscated the tomahawk, spent the morning refining the subtle differences between “waijela” and “waddi” in this regard, and threatened to call in waijela policeman (baleejeman) should he offend again.

In November, 1920, an epidemic of sandy blight broke out among the natives young and old, and in attending them I developed the complaint myself, a very painful granulation that resulted for a time in almost total blindness. The nearest doctor was at Port Augusta, 427 miles away.  the confines of my breakwind, but I could thread the well-known tracks within it without injury, and grope my way to the pipe-line for water. By covering all the things I used most with white tops, I could manage to attend to my own needs, and to feed the natives, who daily brought me firewood. They were amazed at my affliction and looked upon me with “Physician, heal thyself!” written very legibly upon their faces, for was I not ngangarli, doctor of all magic hearings? The recurrent attacks of this malady that I endured alone in the ensuing years were the most difficult periods I have known in all my life. Not once but several times, bending over my open fire-place to make my cup of tea, a smell of burning has been my only warning that my clothing was on fire. So grave and so prolonged was this first attack that I believed I was threatened with permanent blindness, and early in 1922 made the thousand-mile journey to Perth to consult an oculist. That was to be the last holiday-if holiday it can be called-for twelve years of so much increasing difficulty and disheartenment that, had it not been for the guiding light of my ideals of service, and my deep love and sympathy for the natives, I could never have lived them through.

Twenty-five, and sometimes forty at a time, would come to me for food and clothing. I loved to hear them chattering outside the breakwind, and if I had recently received a cheque for an article, there was plenty for all. There was an eclipse of the sun on September 21, 1922, and the natives ran to me in fear. They told me that the hand of maamu-waddi, the spirit man, was covering the earth while the sun and moon were guri-arra-husband and wife together. They believed that it presaged disaster, and clung to my clothing as I sat with my smoked glasses, quietly observing the phenomenon.

“You see,” I said, “Kabbarli gathers the maamu to her, so that it cannot hurt you,” and they were quietened.

Nevertheless, disaster was on our track.

In 1922, two bores put down at the Ooldea Soak resulted in an outgush of-salt water. It was the beginning of the end of this magical Yuldil-gabbi that had not failed its people in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations. In the few brief years since the white man’s coming, 52 wells had been sunk, providing 70,000 gallons a week for the railway. The late H. Y. L. Brown, one of Australia’s greatest pioneer geologists, had advised that no boring should be undertaken, but in continual experiment the blue clay-bed that formed a natural reservoir had apparently been pierced. The waters became brackish, injurious to the engines, unpleasant to the taste, and gradually seeped away. In October, 1926, Ooldea Soak closed down. The two towering tanks at the siding, from which supplies had been freighted up and down the line, were now useless. A number of 400-gallon tanks were installed at each siding and the fettlers’ weekly supplies were brought from Kingoonya over 100 miles eastward, and Kalgoorlie, 600 miles west. The natives were forbidden access to these tanks and forced to procure their water direct from the Soak three and a half miles away, where one well even yet yields a limited supply. The valuable pumping machinery was guarded against them, and they had to beg for their water.