In nineteenth-century Australia, Aborigines explained the sudden arrival and strange, pale-skinned appearance of whites with the idea that they were the returned ghosts of their deceased kin. The nineteenth-century colonial pioneer George Grey wrote of an occasion when a tearful old Aboriginal woman approached him exclaiming, ‘Yes, yes, in truth it is him,’ threw her arms around Grey and rested her head upon his breast.
At last the old woman, emboldened by my submission, deliberately kissed me on each cheek… and assured me that I was the ghost of her son, who had sometime before been killed by a spear wound in his breast… My new mother expressed almost as much delight at my return to my family, as my real mother would have done, had I been unexpectedly restored to her.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “All Christendom will here have Refreshment and Gain.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 7, 8. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, p. 34.
Further Reading:
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