Song of the River

By Allen Hancock

Wonnangatta Station lies deep in the mountain country of northeastern Victoria on the Wonnangatta River, one of two branches of the upper section of the Mitchell River in Gippsland. Officially unsolved, the murders of station manager James Barclay and his cook/helper have been the object of much speculation for more than 80 years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Hancock
• Release date: Nov 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458001979

Allen Hancock

Allen Hancock was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1952. He joined the Australian Regular Army in 1970 and spent the next 21 years moving around most areas of Australia. He left the Army in 1992 and has been working as a professional records manager since then. Allen has more than 40 years association with the records industry working with Federal and State Government agencies as well as in higher education and private enterprise.

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Song of the River

Allen Hancock

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Allen Hancock

Cover design by A Hancock

Photograph by A Hancock

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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CHAPTER 1

The Hunter

It was moth season and the hunter looked forward to the feasting as he watched his sons, dressed only in small aprons almost white against their dark skin, run among the rocky outcrops high up on the ridge above the camp. With sticks dragged under the lips of the overhangs they joked with each other while hundreds of greyish brown bodies cascaded into fine mesh baskets already overflowing with the tasty morsels.

Once wings and fur had been singed away over hot ashes the moths would be left as pea-sized lumps of fat craved for by the wandering people starved of oil in their diet during the lean winter months. With a somewhat nutty flavour the moths could be eaten alone as a tasty morsel, gorged upon by the handful until the moth connoisseur felt ill from the sudden change from a fat-free to a high fat diet. They could also be pounded to a paste and formed into greasy patties. Whichever way they were eaten the Bogong Moths of the mountain country would form an important part of the ceremonies during the coming days.

Moth season was a vital element of the lives of these people who moved up from the lowland areas following the melting snows. The scattered family groups joined their neighbouring groups until by early summer large gatherings formed for the important social and spiritual events to be held each year. Such congregations, as well as being important from a cultural perspective, were vital to the continuation of the people who occupied the country south of the mountains of south eastern Australia and known collectively as the Kurnai.

With the people living normally in family or hearth groups for most of the year the gatherings each summer were important for their survival as a group because tribal law stipulated that no member of a group could marry within that group. Even distant cousins were seen as no different to brothers and sisters so marriage within the family group was taboo. Only at the summer gatherings could young men and women of different families mix with enough freedom for them to form future relationships to be formalised after initiation into adulthood.

It was for just such an initiation that the boys prepared now. Beyond the camp the sun had begun to set behind the mountains casting deep shadows over the river flats, the frost clinging to the valley to chill the boys chosen to become men as they listened to the old man who had the task of passing on the tribal lore. The sky darkened quickly, the shadow of the mountains rushing up the slopes of the eastern range where sharp ridges protruded into the valley like the teeth of some long extinct predator. Above the glow of the camp fire stars flickered through the descending frost, the fire’s warmth radiating hot now forcing them back toward the darkness, their faces taught from the searing heat.

Across the creek gloomy shadows joined the sounds of the night closing in. The creek bubbled nearby, rushing down to the river as it meandered sluggishly across the flats. Silence, that was the thing the hunter most liked about the place, only the gentle night sounds penetrating the gathering darkness. It was the way things should be at a time when the boys learnt about the secrets of the tribe’s mythology.

Near the head-waters of Moroka, the old man began his story, the mountain of Nigothoruk rose as a giant among mountains. From its summit the spirits watched over the clans by day. From its slope a creek flowed through a steep sided valley. That was the home of the spirits of Nigothoruk. They returned there each night from their daily vigil and to the clans it was taboo, a place where no man could be permitted to enter. To some of the young men of the tribe who lived nearby, of course to be told not to go somewhere was to issue a challenge to go there. One such youth decided to take up this challenge, to find out for himself what lay at the home of the ancient spirits.

On his return he told how he had crept into the valley where he saw a giant stone shining under the blazing sun, the light from the stone sparkling against the sides of the valley. With time though, the story surrounding the finding of the stone grew and the youth became a hero of his tribe, at least among the other youths.

Eventually this high regard turned into jealousy as his fellows envied his feat and they began to talk of going into the valley themselves and bringing the stone out. Such a stone, they said, must hold great magic and it would be of enormous value to the tribe. The elders, when they heard of the plan, countered with the argument that the stone would surely be a prized possession of the spirits and would be closely guarded and protected by magic spells. The young men held a corroboree, the longest corroboree ever held by their people, to pray for help in their quest. What good would it do, the elders implored, to pray to the spirits for help in the quest to rob those same spirits. But the young men were determined and they prevailed on the rest of the tribe to join them.

Unable to prevent the folly the tribe had decided to embark upon, the elders knew that the tribe’s only hope would be for them to guide their people and hopefully give them at least some protection from the wrath they were sure would come. They advised the tribe to move into the valley together in daylight on the assumption that the spirits would not bring harm to them under the protection of the sun. But, they warned, the people must be out of the valley before nightfall because in darkness the spirits could easily travel and take their revenge against them.

Early the next morning the tribe moved into the valley and, guided by the youth, soon found the yellow stone gleaming in the morning light, the rays of the sun reflecting from its smooth curves. The stone was all that they had been told, and more. As tall as a man its surface seemed to be almost liquid, and ice cold to the touch. No member of the tribe had ever seen anything like it. The stone had been moulded from the fabric of the very earth itself and it was obvious to every member of the tribe that it must contain great magical powers. It was obvious also to the elders that such a magical stone would be jealously guarded by the spirits who would be very angry when they returned to the valley from Nigothoruk after dark.

It was much heavier than anyone had expected it to be when they tried to move it from where it had rested since the beginning of time and it took them nearly an hour to pry it from its bed of rock. Seven men were needed to carry it as the tribe moved ever so slowly back out of the valley and away from the mountain where the spirits must surely be watching them. Despite the ease of the journey into the valley the way out was hard, hampered as the tribe was by the stone, the magic making it reluctant to leave its home. The smooth surface provided no handhold for its carriers. Several times it was dropped and had rolled back into the gully of the creek. After going to so much trouble to get the stone none of the tribe was prepared to leave it and on each occasion the stone was recovered, wasting precious time as the sun moved down toward the horizon ahead of them.

"This was what the elders had feared. The tribe would soon be trapped in the valley and it was certain that the spirits would find them there with the stolen magical stone. They told the tribe to abandon their treasure and to leave immediately but the tribe refused. They had come too far to give up, within sight of the valley’s mouth. The elders failed to convince them of their peril and could think of only one last ploy to hopefully protect the tribe.

‘A camp was made right there at the valley’s mouth. The women and children were sent out to gather wood and the camp was encircled by fires to burn throughout the night. The spirits were unable to penetrate the light, even that of camp fires."

As the dusk darkened the valley, black storm clouds built up around Nigothoruk’s summit spreading quickly towards the valley, their peaks burning fiercely red from the light of the setting sun. Soon the entire valley was black except for the ring of campfires blazing on the side of the hill above the creek. Inside this circle of fire the men of the tribe stood guard over their prize while the women and children foraged around the hills for enough wood to keep it burning all night. As the clouds blacked out even the moon and the stars it was only this circle of light preventing the spirits from taking back the magic stone. Deep inside the clouds sheets of lightning flashed above the camp and the spirits’ anger thundered down the valley as the wind began to blow from the mountain. The spirits were searching for those who had stolen their magical stone.

With the wind also came the rain. Pounding against the face of Nigothoruk, the deluge quickly filled the small streams running from the mountain to feed the creek, turning it into a raging torrent as it raced through the valley towards the river beyond. Soon the rain too began to fan out from the mountain as the wind caught it, smashing huge drops into the hillsides. Against such a downpour even the roaring fires could not survive as white hot coals hissed and sputtered, changing to a steaming black sludge.

A single bolt of lightning arced between the earth and the clouds above the camp illuminating for an instant the horror on the faces of the men guarding the stone. The lightning struck the ground releasing forces no man had ever before witnessed as trees on the hillside were torn out by their roots and flung over the camp by the rush of wind, flattening it and the men who waited there. Even the women and children still out gathering firewood were cut down by the very trees they tried to find shelter under.

Of the entire tribe only three women were spared because they had ventured beyond the mouth of the valley. Looking back, those women watched as the top of the mountain exploded, raining tons of rock down onto the camp. All they could do was to cower in fear as the storm raged throughout the night until darkness was replaced by the pale grey light of dawn.

As the sun crept up from the eastern horizon so too the three women crept back into the valley to search for their men. Looking towards Nigothoruk, they trembled in fear when they saw that the top of the mountain had disappeared, thrown into the valley to form a wall of rock covering where the camp had been. Buried beneath this wall were the rest of their people and the yellow stone they had worked so hard to steal from the spirits. Beyond the wall the waters from the storm had built up to form a lake.

The women quickly ran from the area to the lands of the nearest tribe, the Welwenduk, the name of their own tribe to be lost forever in time, lost with their people under the lake, Tali Karng.

The hunter enjoyed the stories as much as did the boys who were hearing them for the first time. As much as the tales were entertaining they also represented the history of the people, the very basis of their culture and the structure of the tribal laws governing them.

But the hunter had other things on his mind as the boys moved away to their beds of leaves where their appointed guardians would take turns throughout the night to ensure that none had more than a few moments of sleep. The boys were sleepy now but sleep was to be denied them for the rest of the night, and for the next one as well. They would be kept fully awake until close to collapse from physical exhaustion when they would be unable to resist as the guardians would pull out each of their pubic hairs one by one, to be followed by their facial hair and those others beneath their arms.

Sleep eluded the hunter too that night and in the morning the dream was still on his mind as he stared into the still water of the inner bend of the river, the gathering dawn reflecting its purple light before him. From the forest beyond, the call of the birds echoed across to the camp where his people stirred from their sleep. His dream worried him, its vision of what-was-to-be profound in its clarity yet veiled in the fog of its meaning. The hunter absently fingered the grizzly talisman hanging from the cord about his neck, partly hidden from view behind the wiry curls of his dense beard.

The talisman, or bret as his people knew it, was worn as a decoration, a charm, and also as a reminder of his dead brother, speared five summers ago during a raid by a group of the northern Maneroo people. The hunter, after eating the fat from his brother’s kidneys to transfer his brother’s spirit to himself, had severed the hand from his body. Burying it in the dry sand near the lake where his people spent the winter he kept a fire burning above it until the heat had sucked away all of the moisture. The hunter then plaited the dried sinews of his brother’s arm into the cord from which it now hung. Two other two brets hanging beside his brother’s were made from the hands of close boyhood friends, also dead as the result of the constant feuding between the Kurnai and their neighbours of the Maneroo and Omeo plateaux

The hunter removed the bret of his brother and twisted it on its cord until it was wound tightly. When a difficult decision had to be made the released hand would spin on its uncoiling string of sinew to twist again in the opposite direction, coiling and uncoiling until it eventually came to rest pointing in a particular direction or indicating the correct course to follow. The hunter watched as his brother’s shrivelled hand waved before him, pointing as its motion ceased to the southeast, down the river towards the lake country

He sighed as he rose to walk slowly back into the camp, wrapping his cloak of fur tightly about his shoulders, the chill of the dawn mixing with the dread he felt about the dream he must now explain to the council of men. It would not be the hunter’s decision alone to move the group back down the river to the lowlands near the lakes. The Kurnai, as did most of the native people, had no concept of chieftainship. Decisions were always made jointly by the men of each tribe. Fathers, sons, brothers, uncles and cousins, all with an equal status within the group once the rites of manhood had been fulfilled.

The women of the tribe were considered to be the vassals of their husbands and fathers and as the hunter approached the cluster of shelters used by his two wives and their children, he barely acknowledged with an almost imperceptible nod the tall slender girl who passed him as she made her way to the river, a leather water bag slung loosely from her shoulder. At thirteen years the girl was the second of the hunter’s three surviving children born to his first wife. His two sons were still away preparing for their manhood initiations, the eldest more apprehensive than the younger because he had been through the ceremony twicebefore. It was normal for the boys to undergo the dehairing for several consecutive summers before being admitted into the council of men. Only after this his final ordeal would he be free to visit the camps of the neighbouring groups to choose his bride.

The girl had only recently been initiated into the lore of womanhood but, as his eldest son would soon do, young men from the other camps had already visited to make their wishes known to her family. The hunter’s first wife had given birth to one other child barely a year after the girl. While children were loved, and any behaviour short of insolence was tolerated, the girl had not been old enough to be weaned from her mother’s breast. With the mother of two infants unable to feed both children at the same time, according to custom the unfortunate baby was required to be sacrificed to allow the older child, already having survived its first winter and with a greater chance of surviving its next, to continue to live.

The Kurnai were a superstitious people believing that sickness, deformity and death were the work of evil spirits. Medicine men practiced the magical arts rather than medicine in its modern sense. Illness was treated by incantations and spells, often convincing their patients into believing themselves to be cured by pretending to extract from their bodies some evil substance purported to be the cause of the problem

The youngest of the hunter’s children, a young boy of three years, was still constantly at his mother’s side. He was the progeny of the marriage to his second wife, his brother’s widow, who had been inherited by the family upon his death.

The smile disappeared behind the hunter’s tangled beard when he remembered the seriousness of the mission he had set himself. A meeting of the council of men was needed to discuss the dream and the opinion of the medicine man as to the dream’s spiritual significance would also have to be taken into consideration before any decisions could be made. The hunter was convinced that the dream bode ill for the future of his people

Across the river from the camp the bush came down close to the water’s edge. Traditionally the Kurnai established their camps at the junctions of rivers or creeks or, as in the case of this camp, on the inside of a bend in the river. Surrounded on three sides by water the camp could easily be defended from attack by their enemies who regularly intruded into their lands

From his vantage point near the edge of the trees on the opposite shore a warrior listened to the sounds of the camp as it came to life, sweat glistening on his face despite the cool of the morning. He lay still as he had done since the moon had gone behind the mountain to the west of the valley, and he watched as the girl stopped beside the river dropping the leather container into the deep pool where the water was slowed on the inside of the bend. With hardly a discernible movement he slipped silently into the stream hidden by the dark shadow of a low bushy tree, his dark body sliding smoothly through the water so that no sign could be seen on the surface.

Falling to her knees the girl opened the neck of the bag to allow the water to fill it. The leather needed to soak before the seams could swell sufficiently to make a tight seal and she rubbed the joins to speed the saturation process.

The girl screamed suddenly, a dark hand ripping the bag from her grip as another pulled her into the icy river. No need for stealth now as the warrior held her tightly against his chest, his free arm pulling them with all his strength across to the far side of the river. On dry land again, the warrior threw the girl across his shoulders as he would the carcass of a kangaroo after a hunt. Slowing only momentarily to pick up his spear and boomerang, he ran into the shelter of the forest, his prize only then beginning to scream her protests at the abduction.

When the girl’s first shout erupted from across the river every man in the camp snatched up his weapons instantly, ready to repel what seemed to be another attack from the people of the north. By the time the warrior had disappeared into the trees a party was already on the riverbank ready to give chase and a boomerang flashed by him, spinning over his head to bounce off a tree trunk nearby.

The hunter smiled secretly to himself, but for the benefit of the younger men he tried to look stern at the audacity of the attack by the warrior. He knew he was a good man, if a trifle impetuous. A marriage could have been arranged simply between the hunter and the warrior’s father but now the youth had provoked a quarrel between the two families. To put the matter right the young men of the girl’s family would have to give chase and the suitor could suffer a severe beating if he was caught.

Although not sanctioned openly by the Kurnai people, the taking of a bride by abduction was common among them. If the man failed in his quest he was abused by his intended bride’s family and often clubbed, but if he could keep ahead of the pursuing pack then he had proved himself worthy of his prize. The object of the exercise would be fulfilled in that a union outside the family group was achieved. The hunter wished the men well as they set off in pursuit and he turned back to the camp. This was a young man’s duty and the hunter was needed for more important things.

I have dreamed for many nights now, the hunter explained to the men gathered before him. I have seen strange beasts in our lands and they fill my mind with fear for our people.

What was the nature of these beasts you saw? the old man asked him.

There were many, he continued. Great horned beasts, their voices moaning among the mountains like the crying of the spirits of our ancestors. Among them other beasts, spirit men with skin the colour of the dry grass in summer. Men with four legs, their feet like stones crushing the bones of our people as they race swiftly across our lands.

Dreams have many meanings, said the old man, closing his eyes and remaining motionless as he tried to imagine the creatures the hunter had described. The men watched intently, waiting for him to continue.

Spirits they were certainly, the old men told them after a while. Your dream has been seen by others of our people too, but as to its true meaning I cannot say.

I have spoken of this to he who was my brother, the hunter said. We must move back down the river towards the lakes.

Your brother is wise in his council, the old man agreed. The protection of the clan may be called for and we should speak of this vision with the elders of the Brabralong.

I agree, said another old man, his hair white against his dark skin. A clan council is needed and I feel the winter will soon be upon us before its time. We should move our people to the lowlands. There was little need for further discussion, the men agreeing that a move to the coastal plains before the early snows came to the mountains above their valley would be the wisest choice, as well as being an opportunity to consult with other tribes of the clan.

…

CHAPTER 2

The Pathfinders

In its own way it could be said that the history of the Wonnangatta Valley is closely linked to that of Gippsland, and that in turn to the history of the state of Victoria. Probably the first European to enter the Wonnangatta Valley was Angus McMillan. In 1857, when he saw the grasslands below Mount Howitt as good summer grazing for his cattle, he registered the upper part of the valley as the Eaglevale run of his already vast Gippsland holdings.

The story of Angus McMillan though begins at the very start of exploration in eastern Victoria because, since the early days of the colony, Victoria was a region officially destined as never to be settled. When John Oxley, Surveyor General of the colony of New South Wales, returned from the last of his explorations into the interior in 1819, he declared that the land beyond the Blue Mountains was uninhabitable and useless for all purposes of civilised man. That statement effectively put an end to any further intrusions into the supposed wastelands until the arrival of the colony’s new governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane. Brisbane wanted to confirm Oxley’s opinion and in 1824 he began to look for somebody to lead an expedition to the southwest.

Growing up in the rural outpost of Parramatta during the time of Governor Lachlan Macquarie were two native born Australians (Currency Lads). John Batman was the son of a convict, and his close friend, Hamilton Hume, the son of the Superintendent of Convicts. As boys, they dreamt of finding a way across the mountains to the western part of the colony, but their ambitions were thwarted by the Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth expedition long before either was old enough to make the attempt. Batman later found himself on the wrong side of the settlement’s chaplain and magistrate, the Rev Samuel Marsden, and he eventually left for Van Diemen’s Land with his younger brother, Henry. Hume remained and distinguished himself as a bushman taking part in several expeditions, one of which resulted in the discovery of the Yass Plains.

Hume made a formal submission for the post of leader of the expedition, but the indecisive Brisbane had since been influenced by people close to Oxley who were anxious that his observations not be proved wrong. Hamilton Hume, however, had other ideas and he sought private sponsorship for the project.

There was also in