Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/64

 6 CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES. dashed at him before he could throw. He turned to flee, but before he could escape, the sabre of his pursuer entered his buttock, and he fell disabled to the ground. He carried the scar with him as long as he lived. The Narrinyeri never forgot the punishment they received for the murder of the passengers and crew of the Maria. A man who is now a member of the Church at Point Macleay told me that his father used to relate to him the particulars of the affair. He said that Major O’Halloran’s party rounded up the blacks in the camp, and seized some men and marched them off to some trees. The white men then made signs to the rest of the natives to look at those trees, and suddenly they saw their countrymen hauled up to the limbs by ropes fastened to their necks. They gazed for a minute at the horrid sight, and then the whole party broke up and ran in every direction. Some of them fled above twenty miles in their terror before they stopped. They never afterwards touched the bodies, but left them hanging until they dropped from the trees. The Lake Albert tribe murdered, about 1844, a man named McGrath, at a place afterwards called McGrath’s Flat. McGrath, who was going overland with cattle, got some of the native young men to conduct him round Lake Albert. Afterwards he wished them to continue to guide him beyond the boundaries of their tribe, and upon their refusal tried to persuade them to do as he wished. This somehow awoke the suspicions of the old men, and they attacked and murdered him. The perpetrators of the deed were punished. The Narrinyeri were always a daring and restless people, and used to give some trouble to the authorities by their depredations and sheep-stealing. One of the first troopers of the police stationed on the Murray told me that when they went there they never dared to go to the river for a bucket of water, although it was only a few hundred yards from their huts, without pistols in their belts. The same man told me that on one occasion a native had been very insolent to him, and at last provoked him to such an extent that he kicked him out of the hut. A short