Old Times in the Kimberley

The new generation of Australian business pooh-bahs proudly call themselves social justice warriors but as such they can’t hold a candle, let alone a spear, to the indigenous warriors of our very recent past. Stamp their little feet as they do, shriek shrilly and appoint as many Behavioural Awareness Officers as they wish, but indigenous men and women as recently as the first quarter of the last century would have left them battered, or dead, in the dust and in some instances might even have eaten them.

Life in Australia pre-settlement was a bloody affair, even around the home campfires, with physical conflict a constant and magic an ever-present menace. The savages may have been noble, in the Rousseauvian mould, but they were brutal.

One of the best accounts of tribal life is to be found in the memoir of Kimberley leader Albert Barunga, an elder of the Worora tribe. Among the many gifts he left the nation is the story of his life, written up as a book by the noted West…