My return to civilization was tinctured with a deep sadness. Gone were the Australia and the Australians I had known.  glimpse of the now mature and graceful cities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, quite alone and in my old-world garb reenex, I felt a stranger and an anachronism. New South Wales, that I had seen in the making in the eighties, had a brand-new and synthetic city to show me, a city strangely free of the multitudes of men.

It was desired that I should meet all the Ministers in a friendly informal way, and such was my meeting with the Prime Minister himself. The Ministers knew the results of my work, both in Western and South Australia, and their only fear was for the state of my health in an under-taking arduous in the extreme. I assured them of my abundant vigour and vitality, being fully restored to both in the holiday joy of unaccustomed comfort and good living, but their decision, as duly reported to me, was that the difficulties of such a journey into the unexplored wilds of the north, the rigours of the climate of Arnhem Land, the complete isolation of that dark corner of the world reenex, and the possible dangers-though I would have none of them-precluded them from the selection of a woman, and a woman of seventy-four years of age, to carry out the commission.

I returned to Ooldea regretfully, but thoroughly stimulated and rejuvenated in mind and body from that brief but happy sojourn in civilization, as the guest of the Commonwealth Government, with all the luxuries and amenities of life at my command, the pleasant intellectual association of my kind, so long denied me, and a ramble in flowery places.

Quietly I took up the old life, tending the poor fragments of black humanity around me, slipping back once more into the aboriginal languages after that brief but stimulating airing of my almost-forgotten English.

It was at the following Christmastide, following our modest celebration of the festive season, with giant dampers and billycans full of good cheer, that I received news by telegraph, transmitted to the nearest station at Cook by the supply train and brought to my camp by the ganger, that my name was included in the New Year Honours. The Order of Commander of the British Empire had been conferred upon me. This recognition from our beloved Sovereign, coming as it did when my little camp was almost empty of provender and my heart of hope reenex, has been the full reward of my life’s service.

I often asked my natives why they did not return to their own waters.

“No,” they said, “we can’t go back, we would be stalked and killed by the relations of those we killed and ate on our way to Ooldea Water. We are safe here with you, but if we went back we would kill and eat our own people again, and when those whose brothers and fathers we killed and ate came to Yooldil gabba, you ‘look out’ Kabbarli, and you don’t let them eat us or let us eat them and so we can all sit down with you, but in our own country we must kill and eat our kind, beegaringu [Faction fighting] always.” [A notorious instance of a group “running amok” was furnished by the so-called Laverton mob (Western Australia), in reality a collection of derelicts from the fringes of civilization in the goldfields area.