On mentioning the
circumstance to one of the early settlers, he said my loam had been
taken from the spot on which the blacks used to burn their dead.
Soon after he arrived at Colac he saw there a solitary blackfellow
crouching before a fire in which bones were visible. So, pointing to
them, he asked what was in the fire, and the blackfellow replied with
one word "lubra." He was consuming the remains of his dead wife, and
large tears were coursing down his cheeks. Day and night he sat
there until the bones had been nearly all burned and covered with
ashes. This accounted for the fragments of bones in my black loam;
why it was not fertile, I know, but I don't know how to express the
reason well.
While the trenching of my vineyard was going on, Billy Nicholls
looked over the fence, and gave his opinion about it. He held his
pipe between his thumb and forefinger, and stopped smoking in stupid
astonishment. He said--"That ground is ruined, never will grow
nothing no more; all the good soil is buried; nothing but gravel and
stuff on top; born fool."
Old Billy was a bullock driver, my neighbour and enemy, and lived,
with his numerous progeny, in a hut in the paddock next to mine. In
the rainy seasons the water flowed through my ground on to his, and
he had dug a drain which led the water past his hut, instead of
allowing it to go by the natural fall across his paddock.
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