His Own Country

📖 The Scoop

HIS OWN COUNTRY is derived from the tradition of the Kabi tribe's midwives burying the afterbirth in the place where the child was born thus claiming HIS OWN COUNTRY for the rest of the child's life. Kagariu (kookaburra) was born about 1841 when the Archer Bros. first settled at Durundur in Sept 1841. The child grew up to be a fully initiated tribal member but at the same time was learning the ways of the white man... a man IN two cultures. On Manumbar Station he became an expert horseman who could ride the wildest horse. Perhaps his life of crime began when he waylaid a teacher riding home and she whipped him across the face badly injuring his eye. White settlers caught him and whipped him mercilessly. He said that he could not forgive what he had seen, what white man did to black women. Thenceforth he roamed south-east Qld terrorising lonely white women left alone while husbands were away working, but he also committed crimes against black women and was hunted by white police and black law givers until he was eventually captured by black men. After hanging, his body was given to a Russian Scientist who preserved it and took it with him to Germany for study. No trace of his body has ever been found.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / General (fancy, right?)