Walkabout by Marshall James Vance

Author:Marshall, James Vance [Marshall, James Vance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Aborigine, Adventure, Australian Outback, Fiction, Novel
ISBN: 9781590174906
Publisher: Penguin / Puffin
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PHYSICALLY the Australian Aboriginal is tough. He can stand any amount of heat, exposure, or cold; and his incidence to pain is remarkably low. But he has his Achilles Heel. Mental euthanasia. A propensity for dying purely of autosuggestion.

Experiments have proved this: experiments carried out by Australia’s leading doctors. On the one hand a group of Aboriginals – voluntarily of course – have spent a day in the desert at a temperature of roughly 95°-100° Fahrenheit, and have spent the night in a sealed-off chamber, thermostatically controlled to a temperature of minus 15° (47° of frost). They slept well without any sort of protection; and, though they were naked, felt no cold. On the other hand, Aboriginals who are a hundred per cent physically fit have been known to die purely because a tribal medicine man has put the death curse on them. One such man was admitted to a state-capital hospital. Thorough tests proved that there was nothing the matter with him; psycho-analysts tried to instil in him the will to live, the will to fight. But in vain. The medicine man had said he was going to die. And die he did: of self-induced apathy.

Death, to the Aboriginal, is something that can’t be fought. Those whom the Spirit wants, he takes; and it’s no good kicking against the pricks.

That was why the bush boy accepted the fact of his impending death without question, without struggle. There was in his mind no flicker of hope. The lubra’s terror, to him, could have only the one meaning. He had seen tenor like hers before: in a woman’s eyes after prolonged and unsuccessful childbirth; in an old man’s face when he had become too weak to walk and the tribe had passed him by, leaving him alone, alone in the waterless desert. And so he now stood; without hope; passively waiting; wondering, as he stared across the moonlit valley, how and when the Spirit of Death would come to claim him.

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