He looked like a
living skeleton, but he was not left behind to die. He was sitting
on the shoulders of his brother, his hands grasping for support the
hair on the head, and his wasted legs dangling in front of the
other's ribs. These people were sometimes hunted as if they were
wolves, but two brother wolves would not have been so kind to each
other.
Before the white men came the blacks never buried their dead; they
had no spades and could not dig graves. Sometimes their dead were
dropped into the hollow trunks of trees, and sometimes they were
burned. There was once a knoll on the banks of the Barongarook
Creek, below the court-house, the soil of which looked black and
rich. When I was trenching the ground near my house for vines and
fruit trees, making another garden of paradise in lieu of the one I
had lost, I obtained cart loads of bones from the slaughter yards and
other places, and placed them in trenches; and in order to fertilize
one corner of the garden, I spread over it several loads of the
rich-looking black loam taken from the knoll near the creek. After a
few years the vines and trees yielded great quantities of grapes and
fruit, and I made wine from my vineyard. But the land on which I had
spread the black loam was almost barren, and yet I had seen fragments
of bones mixed with it, and amongst them a lower jaw with perfect
teeth, most likely the jaw of a young lubra.
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