to each
other.

Before the white men came the blacks never buried their dead; they
had no spades and could not dig graves. Sometimes their dead were
dropped into the hollow trunks of trees, and sometimes they were
burned. There was once a knoll on the banks of the Barongarook
Creek, below the court-house, the soil of which looked black and
rich. When I was trenching the ground near my house for vines and
fruit trees, making another garden of paradise in lieu of the one I
had lost, I obtained cart loads of bones from the slaughter yards and
other places, and placed them in trenches; and in order to fertilize
one corner of the garden, I spread over it several loads of the
rich-looking black loam taken from the knoll near the creek. After a
few years the vines and trees yielded great quantities of grapes and
fruit, and I made wine from my vineyard. But the land on which I had
spread the black loam was almost barren, and yet I had seen fragments
of bones mixed with it, and amongst them a lower jaw with perfect
teeth, most likely the jaw of a young lubra. 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 hi