Читать книгу Watchandi Man - Robert Hallsworth - Страница 3

An extract from the West Australian newspaper dated 3^rd. Feb. 1934.

‘Pieter, ------ with a great blonde beard, not white but bright golden, sturdy sinuous limbs, decidedly bandy, a noble girth and a passion for the sea – none of these, aboriginal characteristics. Provided that there is the same strong atavistic tendency among the white races, as there is among the Negroid and Asiatic, Pieter is quite possibly an amazing throwback over fourteen or fifteen generations, to the early Dutchmen. It may even be to the two desperadoes marooned by Pelsaert near Champion bay in 1629. “

1954 and a lone geo-explorer draws the Landrover into his base camp as the sun is setting in the western sea.

‘Your late Phil’ a colleague calls to him.

‘Yeah.’ he replies, ‘I’ve just been watching that character on the cliff top again. He just seems to wander up and down, looking out to sea all the time, as if he is looking for something ‘.

‘Probably a Watchandi’ said his companion, himself part aboriginal.

‘A sea watcher, you know, a throwback from the old Nhanda people who have lived around here for hundreds of years’

‘But what is he looking for?’ said Phil.

‘The old people called the sea, Kuranup, they believed that was where the spirits of the dead lived, and sometimes, so the legend goes, the spirits would come back from the sea, with white faces, in tall ships with white sails. Sometimes they brought good times and sometimes they brought bad.

Perhaps he’s just watching Kuranup for another, ship from the dead’.