Cirrus@Austlit

Editor's note: An unusual story, in which the famous author of Sheepmates, Black Waterlily, Desert Saga and Australia Through the Windscreen recalls the tragic Burke and Wills Expedition, and gives us a glimpse of it through the eyes of an Aboriginal.

Author's note: When I was living off my rifle and traps on Cooper's Creek, it was old Kuddramitchi who taught me the difference between a day-old and a week-old dog-track, and the difference between those and a trail an hour old. It was Kuddramitchi and his sophisticated son 'Jimmy Harrison', who between them, taught me the Yantawonta language and gave me that insight into the blackfellow's psychology that enabled me to produce Desert Saga and this story. In Duddramitchi I had a survivor of the tribe that witnessed the penetration of their land by the first white men to cross south - north, and over on the Wills in N.W.Q. I was fortunate in knowing ond Silver, the [abo], who as a boy, escaped by shamming dead from the Suliman Creek massacre by whites as a reprisal for the spearing of two white men.