by Graham Seal
The story of the lost children became a staple in Victorian school readers and was continuously updated for new generations, still appearing in these books as late as the 1980s. The following version comes from a Victorian school reader from the 1960s. It uses some inaccurate terms—there were no Aboriginal ‘monarchs’ or ‘subjects’, for example—and some unrealistic quotations of Aboriginal English, as well as mixing up some minor details of the rescue. But it is a good example of how the story of the Duff children was reworked as a moral tale, at first emphasising Christian virtues and later highlighting self-sacrifice and strength of character. Through all these adaptations, Jane’s heroism remained pivotal.
Three children—Isaac, nine years old; Jane, seven and a half; and Frank, a toddler, not four—helped their mother, and filled in the long day as best they could, playing about the hut, for there was no school for them to attend.
Well, one day, their mother called them, and said, ‘Now, children, run away to the scrub, and get me some broom to sweep the floor and make it nice for father when he comes home.’
It was a fine day in August—spring was early that year—and the children, who had been to the scrub on the same errand before, liked going: so they set off merrily.
They had a fine time. Isaac amused himself by climbing trees, and cutting down saplings with his tomahawk; he found a possum in a hollow in the trunk of a tree, and poked at the little creature with a stick, but without doing it much harm. Jane chased butterflies, picked flowers, and tried to catch the lizards that Frank wanted so much. When they felt hungry, they all had, in addition to their lunch of bread and treacle, quite a feast of gum from a clump of wattle-trees.
In laughter and play the time passed pleasantly and quickly; and, when half a dozen kangaroos bounded away from them through the bush, their delight knew no bounds. But, by and by, Jane thought of going home; so they gathered each a bundle of broom for Mother, and turned, as they thought, homewards.
After they had walked some distance, Isaac began to think it was farther to the edge of the scrub than he had expected, so he urged his sister and little brother to go faster. In an hour or two the scrub grew thicker, and it looked strange to him. He thought that he might have taken a wrong turn, and started off in another direction, and then tried another, and another; but no remembered spot met his straining eyes.
Then deep dread seized them all. They stopped, and cooeed, and shouted—‘Father! Mother!’ but there was no answer—only the sad ‘caw! caw!’ of a crow, winging its homeward flight, came to their ears.
On they pressed once more. Soon little Frank began to cry; and his sister said, ‘Don’t cry, Frankie dear; don’t cry. We’ll soon be home, and you shall have a nice supper. Let me carry your broom, it’s too heavy for you.’
She took the bundle of tea-tree twigs; and forward again they went with wildly beating hearts, sometimes stopping to cooee and look about; and then on, on till the sun set, and the bush, except for the dismal howl, now and then, of a dingo in the distance, grew gloomy and still.
Tired out and hungry, they huddled together at the foot of a big tree, and said the prayers their mother had taught them. Then they talked of home, wondering if Father would be vexed, and if Mother knew that they were lost. Frank soon cried himself to sleep; and his sister put some of the broom under his head for a pillow. Poor, dear little things! They little thought how glad Mother would be to see them, even without their broom.
As the night went on, it grew cold; and Jane, who was awake, took off her frock to wrap around her little brother, and crept close to him to keep him warm. For hours, she lay listening to the cry of the curlew, and the rush of the possum as it ran, from tree to tree, over the dead leaves and bark. At last, she fell asleep, and slept till the loud, mocking, ‘Ha, ha! ho, ho! hoo, hoo!’ of the laughing-jackass roused her at dawn. What a waking it was! Tired and cold, hungry and thirsty, and lost.
The mother had grown anxious as the day wore on, and the children did not return; and so, late in the afternoon, she went into the scrub, and cooeed for them till she was hoarse. As she got no answer, she became really alarmed, and, at length, hurried back to tell her husband, who, she expected, would return home from his work just before nightfall. He also searched through the scrub, and cooeed till long after dark, but in vain.
Before daybreak next morning, they were up, and, as soon as it was light enough, were hurrying to tell their nearest neighbours what happened, and ask their help in the search. Before dinner-time, a score of willing people—men and women—were scouring the scrub in various directions.
All that day, and the next, and the next, they searched, but found nothing; and the poor mother began to lose hope of ever seeing her darlings again. A messenger had been sent to a station some distance off to bring two or three blackfellows, who were employed there as boundary-riders.
The Australian blacks can find and follow a trail with wonderful skill. They have sharp eyes; and their training in searching for the tracks of the game they hunt causes them to note signs to guide them in places where a white man, even with good eyesight, sees nothing.
The children had been lost on Saturday; and the black trackers—a monarch, King Richard (better known as Dicky), and two subjects, Jerry and Fred—arrived on Wednesday. The three, taking positions some distance apart, began to look about for the trail of small footsteps. They had worked for some hours, when a yell from Dicky brought them to his side. ‘What is it?’ asked the father. ‘There! there!’ exclaimed the black, with a broad smile, pointing to a faint mark of a little boot.
Forward now they went, with the father and some of his neighbours. Sometimes the blacks ran; sometimes they walked; and sometimes they had even to crawl. In rocky places, they had to search carefully for traces, working from one point to another. Whenever this happened, it was a trying time for the poor father, as he felt that every minute’s delay lessened the small chance there was of finding his children alive.
The blacks led on so many miles into the bush that the white men began to think their tracking was all a sham. At last, however, they stopped at the foot of a big gum-tree; and, pointing to three bundles of broom, Dicky said, ‘Him been sleep there, fus night.’
The father was astonished to find that the children had travelled so far in a day, and much troubled at the thought of the long distance they might yet be from him; but he was comforted, too, for he felt that he could trust his guides.
There was no time to stop; but onward the party pressed still faster, till night came and put an end to their efforts for some hours, in spite of their wishes. How the father must have suffered through those hours, and how eagerly he must have watched for the first streaks of the coming dawn!
We can fancy how anxious the poor mother was, also, as day by day passed without any news of the finding of her children. Her fears slowly grew into the belief that they were dead; and her only hope was that their bodies would not be torn to pieces by dingoes, or eaten by ants.
As Dicky was leading next day at a trot, he was seen to halt, and begin looking around him. An anxious ‘What is the matter?’ from the father caused only a sad shake of the head from Dicky; and two fingers held up showed too well what was in his mind. Making a sign to his mates to look about for the dead body, he cast himself on his hands and knees to study the ground. A cry from him soon brought the party together. ‘Here three,’ he said, ‘here two. Big one carry little one’; and he went through the motions of one child taking another on its back.
When the next sleeping-place of the little wanderers was found, the blacks pointed out that the smallest had lain in the middle. ‘Him not get cold,’ they said.
Their third day’s tramp had not been so long as the others had been; and the blacks said again and again. ‘Him plenty tired; not go much longer.’ The tired little feet could not get over the ground so quickly now.
Another camping
-place was reached, and ‘Here yesterday!’ exclaimed Dicky. On that fourth day’s journey, the children had been passing through a patch of broom like that near their home; and the blacks, pointing to some broken twigs, showed that some branches had been broken off. Had they been gathered for a bed? No, there was no sign of that. Dicky turned to the father, and said, ‘Him t’ink it him near home.’ Yes; the children had supposed that they knew where they were when they reached that spot, and their first thought was of mother’s broom. They were weary and starving; but they had been sent for the broom, and they would not go home without it.
‘Him run now,’ said the blacks; ‘Him t’ink it all right’; and they pointed to the signs of haste. But, alas! what a blow to their hopes! By and by a bundle of broom was found. It had been thrown away—a sure sign of despair. ‘Him been lose him. Him been sit down. Mine t’ink it him plenty cry.’ Thus ran Dicky’s history of the event.
Another camping-place was passed; and the blacks became doubly earnest, and kept saying, ‘Him walk slow, slow, slow.’ Soon Dicky whispered, ‘Him close up.’ And then he stopped and pointed before him in silence at something stretched on the ground.
‘They must be dead,’ groaned the father, and rushed forward with drawn face and straining eyes. Though all were living, only one was able to greet him, and that was little Frank, who raised himself slightly, held out his feeble arms, and cried in a weak, husky, voice, ‘Daddy, Daddy, we cooeed for you, but you didn’t come.’ Jane had wrapped her frock around her little brother whenever they lay down to rest; and she and Isaac had carried him for miles, so that he had not suffered so much as they had. All alive, but very near death! Think of it: eight days and eight nights in the bush without food to eat or water to drink!
When they were found, the blacks laughed and cried, and rolled on the ground for joy; and Dicky (we may well call him King Richard now), springing on a horse that belonged to one of the party, gave his last order, ‘Me tak gal home’; and Jane was handed up to him.
For some weeks, the children were between life and death, but kind attention and loving care brought them back to health. The story of their suffering and heroism spread far and wide. Jane’s motherly attention to her little brother has won for her a place among the world’s noble girls.
The theme of the child missing in the bush has lost none of its power, and real disappearances periodically recharge it. Henry Lawson wrote poems and short stories on the subject; country singer Johnny Ashcroft had a national and international hit in 1960 with a song titled ‘Little Boy Lost’ in the wake of another search and rescue drama involving a four-year-old boy in northern New South Wales. And the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain in 1980—and the now notorious trial of her parents—gripped the public imagination and led to a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie.
EUROPEAN STORIES BEGAN mingling with Aboriginal ones within a few years of the first settlement. Just as towns, rivers and mountains were given often-mangled indigenous names, so new hybrid legends arose, including that of the fearsome bunyip, the human-like yowie and the Min Min lights.
The bunyip
Bunyips are creatures of Aboriginal mythology; a few groups called them something like banib. They were usually said to be hairy, though sometimes feathered, and to live in deep water holes and ponds from where they attacked unwary passing humans. The figure of the bunyip quickly merged with stories of European water monsters such as the northern English Jenny (or Ginny) Greenteeth.
The earliest substantial description of a bunyip was provided in 1852 in the reminiscences of William Buckley, an escaped convict who lived with Victorian Aborigines from 1803 to 1835:
I could never see any part [of the bunyip] except the back, which appeared to be covered with feathers of a dusky-grey colour. It seemed to be about the size of a full-grown calf. When alone, I several times attempted to spear a Bun-yip; but had the natives seen me do so it would have caused great displeasure. And again, had I succeeded in killing, or even wounding one, my own life would probably have paid the forfeit; they considering the animal something supernatural.
But accounts of water-dwelling monsters had surfaced some thirty years earlier in the Sydney press. Perhaps the earliest serious appearance of the bunyip in European records is found in the 1821 minutes of the Philosophical Society of Australasia. Three years before, the explorer Hamilton Hume had found bones of apparently amphibious animals near Lake Bathurst, in New South Wales. The society resolved to give Hume a grant ‘for the purpose of procuring a specimen of the head, skin or bones’.
The Melbourne Morning Herald of 29 October 1849 reported a bunyip at Phillip Island. One was also reported in a lagoon near Melrose, South Australia, in the early 1850s. It was described as ‘a large blackish substance advancing towards the bank, which as I approached raised itself out of the water. I crept towards it . . . It had a large head and a neck something like that of a horse with thick bristly hair . . . Its actual length would be from 15 to 18 feet.’ There were several alleged sightings in the 1870s, from Tasmania to central Queensland. In the 1890s a bunyip was seen in the Warra Warra Waterhole near Crystal Brook, South Australia. The newspaper report of this incident neatly sums up the ongoing problem with bunyip sightings: ‘Although seen during the last ten days by no less than six different persons, none of them can give an intelligent description of what the bunyip is like.’
In New South Wales, Katherine Langloh-Parker documented stories of water-dwelling monsters among the Euahlayi: ‘Several waterholes are taboo as bathing-places. They are said to be haunted by Kurreah, which swallow their victims whole, or by Gowargay, the featherless emu, who sucks down in a whirlpool any one who dares to bathe in his holes.’
In his Bunjil’s Cave: myths, legends and superstitions of the Aborigines of south-east Australia, Aldo Massola recorded stories of bunyips and many other monsters and bad spirits, including the mindie, which was ‘greatly feared by all the tribes in north-western and central Victoria’, and was described as ‘a huge snake, very, very long, very thick and very powerful. He was visible, yet not visible.’
This story of a bunyip causing a deluge or great flood was probably collected in Victoria in the 1890s:
. . . a party of men were once fishing in a lake, when one man baited his hook with a piece of flesh and soon felt a tremendous bite. Hauling in his line, he found that he had caught a young bunyip, a water monster of which the people were much afraid; but though his companions begged him to let it go, because the water monsters would be angry if it were killed, he refused to listen to them and started to carry the young bunyip away. The mother, however, flew into a great rage and caused the waters of the lake to rise and follow the man who had dared to rob her of her young. The deluge mounted higher and higher, until all the country was covered, and the people, fleeing in terror, took refuge upon a high hill; but as the flood increased, gradually surmounting it and touching the people’s feet, they were all turned into black swans and have remained so ever since.
The Ngarrindjerie people of South Australia preserve stories of bunyip-like mulgewongks. These creatures live in rivers and drag unsuspecting swimmers down to their caves. Dangerous as mulgewongks are, it is unlucky to kill one. In a story told by Ngarrindjerie man Henry Rankine in 1990, a riverboat captain unwise enough to kill such a creature sickened and died two weeks later. ‘He did not listen to the old people who said to him, “Don’t do that”,’ Rankine said, adding that his people still warn their children not to swim in the river at night.
Similar tales of water-dwelling monsters were told by the Nyungar people of southwestern Australia. The marghett, a male figure, was round but very long, with a large head and a great many teeth. It travelled by night, so was rarely seen. If an unwary Nyungar ventured into a marghett’s waterhole, the creature would softly seize its victim’s legs and drag him or her to a watery death.
So widespread and common were such stori
es that by 1891 it was possible for Mrs Campbell Praed to write: ‘Everyone who has lived in Australia has heard of the bunyip. It is the one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast. The old world has her tales of ghoul and vampire, of Lorelei, spook and pixie, but Australia has . . . her bunyip.’
By this time the bunyip had become routinely used by white Australians to discipline their children. In his Life in the Australian Backblocks (1911), E.S. Sorenson wrote:
The average youngster has a horror of darkness, and talks in awe-struck whispers of hairy men, ghosts and bunyips. This fear is inculcated from babyhood. The mother can’t always be watching in a playground that is boundless, and she knows the horror that waits the bushed youngster. So she tells them there is a bunyip in the lagoon, and gigantic eels in the creek; and beyond that hill there, and in yonder scrub, there is a ‘bogey-man’. Those fairy tales keep the children within bounds—until they are old enough to know better.
Aboriginal parents also used monster stories to warn and control their children.
The figure of the bunyip became deeply embedded in Australian popular culture—it has found its way into children’s stories, art, plays and verse. It also travelled to Britain, from where it was reimported in new versions, such as this one from Andrew Lang’s The Brown Fairy Book (1904), elaborating on the tradition collected in Victoria a decade or so earlier:
Long, long ago, far, far away on the other side of the world, some young men left the camp where they lived to get some food for their wives and children. The sun was hot, but they liked heat, and as they went they ran races and tried [to see] who could hurl his spear the farthest, or was cleverest in throwing a strange weapon called a boomerang, which always returns to the thrower.
They did not get on very fast at this rate, but presently they reached a flat place that in time of flood was full of water, but was now, in the height of summer, only a set of pools, each surrounded with a fringe of plants, with bulrushes standing in the inside of all. In that country the people are fond of the roots of bulrushes, which they think as good as onions, and one of the young men said that they had better collect some of the roots and carry them back to the camp. It did not take them long to weave the tops of the willows into a basket, and they were just going to wade into the water and pull up the bulrush roots when a youth suddenly called out: ‘After all, why should we waste our time in doing work that is only fit for women and children? Let them come and get the roots for themselves; but we will fish for eels and anything else we can get.’
