Page:Tom Petrie's reminiscences of early Queensland.djvu/27

Rh was speared; he wasn't much hurt, however, and recovered.

While living at the Bight when a boy my father remembers watching the first steamer which ever came up the river (the James Watt stayed in the Bay). When she rounded Kangaroo Point, with her paddles going, the blacks, who were collected together watching, could not make it out, and took fright, running as though for their lives. They were easily frightened in those days. Father remembers another occasion on which they were terrified. His father one night got hold of a pumpkin, and hollowing it out, formed on one side a face, which he lit up by placing a candle inside, the light shining through the openings of the eyes and mouth. This head he put on a pole, and then wrapping himself in a sheet with the pole, he looked to the frightened blacks' imagination for all the world like a ghost, and they could hardly get away fast enough.

From early childhood "Tom" was often with the blacks, and since there was no school to go to, and hardly a white child to play with, he naturally chummed in with all the little dark children, and learned their language, which to this day he can speak fluently. A pretty, soft-sounding language it is on his lips, but rather the opposite when spoken by later comers; indeed, I do not think that any white man unaccustomed to it from childhood can ever successfully master the pronunciation.

"Tom," and his only sister, when children used to hide out among the bushes, in order to watch the blacks during a fight; and once when the boy had been severely punished by his father for smoking, he ran away from home, and after his people had looked everywhere, they found him at length in the blacks' camp out Bowen Hills way. There was one blackfellow at that time these children used to torment rather unmercifully: a very fierce old man, feared even by the blacks, who believed he could do anything he choose in the way of causing death, etc. He was called "Mindi-Mindi" (or "Kabon-Tom" by the whites), was the head of a small fishing tribe who generally camped at the mouth of the South Pine river, and was a great warrior. One day the children found him outside their home. They