The Germ Growers: An Australian story of adventure and mysteryPotter, Robert
Science
The Germ Growers: An Australian story of adventure and mystery
Potter, Robert
Science fiction, Australian
My story is told now, and there is no occasion to detain you much
longer. Our life ever since we came back to Adelaide, until the visit
to Gippsland which led to the writing of this book, was all of a
piece. It was all spent in Australia and Tasmania. We did some
squatting, and we just glanced at agricultural and mining life. In
every year we spent some weeks in town, and we made some acquaintance
everywhere. But we settled down to nothing. We became very little
richer, but no poorer. We seldom talked about our adventures to each
other, and never to anyone else. But I think they were always more or
less in our minds and kept us unsettled.
Sometimes when we seemed to be forgetting them, or when their effect
upon us appeared to be passing away, something or other would happen
to revive their memory and unsettle us again.
Once, for instance, I was in Sydney with Jack making arrangements for
the purchase of a share in a small station. I was dining out one
evening on the North Shore and as it chanced Jack was not with me.
There was a physician of the company who was a clever talker, and
after the ladies had gone away we got him to tell us some of his
Australian experiences, which were curious and varied. He told us
among other things that he was employed by Government to make a report
on some cases in Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum. After he had examined
these cases the superintendent of the asylum said,
“By the bye, doctor, I have a queer fellow here that I sometimes think
ought not to be here at all. He is an interesting fellow, too, and I
should be much obliged if you would have a look at him.”
“I did have a look at him,” said the physician, “and I found him just
a steady old bush hand, with an uncommon degree of intelligence and
good sense, and a lot of information about the country and the
aborigines. I was just wondering what on earth they could have sent
him here for when he told me with the gravest face the following
story:—He had been more than a year among the blacks and he did not
know how he was to get back to his own people. It was away in the
north-west somewhere, the far north-west. Well, one day, he said,
there was a sort of panic among the blacks, he didn’t know the cause
of it, and he wandered away a mile or two from the camp. He said that
when these panics take them they are jealous of the presence of
strangers. He had a loaded revolver with him.
“There was no sun and he began to think he might lose his way, and so
he made up his mind to return to the blacks’ camp. Just then he heard
a sort of rustle in the air above him, and presently a man, so he
said, jumped out of the clouds and caught him by the collar of his
coat. He said that this man never touched the ground himself, but
tried to lift him off the ground. He drew his revolver and fired.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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