His Own Country is a factual biography by Carol Casey set in Queensland in the mid to late 1800's.
The title "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.
"It had all started so differently. Born into the proud Kabi tribe, into the land of his ancestors, part of the land at Durundur that Nguda claimed for him at birth.
"Taken into a white culture, educated with the white children, his mind now that of a white man superimposed upon his spiritual tribal dreamings. Carol Casey takes us into the heart of the plight of this disenfranchised Aborigine.
"The story of Kagariu, Johnny Campbell, will linger long in the minds of those who read it."
- Daphne Taylor
