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THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA. 27 then refers to the opposition Cook, Dampier, and Phillips met with on their landing, as if they had no right to defend their country. What is a virtue with all other people is a crime in them. Comfortably accommodated in a squatter’s residence, he says there were more settlers killed by the blacks than blacks killed, and thus balances the account. Some murders have been brought before the public in Queensland which called for immediate Government interference. Camps of aboriginals have been attacked, the wretched beings fired upon, and on escaping to the water, were then deliberately shot. On one occasion, one of their number eluded the aboriginal police ; at length they saw a bundle of grass floating, into which they fired and shot the unfor tunate being, who held the grass in his mouth to conceal his head, but the stratagem failed. In another instance, where the aboriginal police attacked the camp, one of the women was seized and violated, and her brains dashed out. In 1880, the Sydney Mail wrote :—“ The doom of the Queensland savage is not merely to perish before the advance, hut to actually receive his death-blow at the hands of the British colonist. In another page, we reprint an article from our senior morning contemporary, which puts this fact beyond dispute. A competent and impartial special reporter declares the condition of things as it is, and his melancholy narrative must re-awaken regret for the fate of the race which enjoyed an uninvaded possession of this continent for centuries, and is now rapidly melting away in the presence of civilization. Stripped of all exaggeration, the story of what is happening in the remote districts of the neighbouring Colony has a horrible sound to Southerners who have no environment of savagery, and to whom peace and plenty have become monotonous and undervalued privileges. Yet the far north of Queensland is not being stained more terribly with aboriginal blood than has been our fair New South Wales. The black was improved off the face of the lands we occupy, as pitilessly as he is now being dismissed from his haunts on the banks of the tropical rivers. We cannot thank God that the pioneer settlers here were more merciful than those who are appropriating the cedar forests and auriferous deposits in Northern Queensland. From first to last the line of contact between the two races has been a red one. From first to last the strong Caucasian has trodden the naked nomad like mire into his own sod. “ It is easy to voice regret and condemnation in general terms ; but could this extermination have been altogether avoided? We think not. What should have been done with the aboriginal? Did his possession of the territory for centuries give him a right to possess it for ever? Did mere possession confer a title so absolute that British colonization must be ranked as a national crime ? Surely no rational man can defend such a view as that. The blackfellow’s title to the country was destroyed by his savagery. Nature gives everybody a chance of some kind, and the blackfellow had his chance. He had given to him a magnificent continent, rich in manifold resources ; but he was lord only over snakes and kangaroos—a king of brutes, but little more than a brute among brutes. Back of the brute there was, no doubt, the germ of manhood; but a creature with only an undeveloped germ of manhood cannot live among men. The blackfellow shrank from men, preferring to dwell with marsupials. He did not under stand, he did not like man—using the word in its large sense. He fought against him as a wild brute would fight—treacherously, savagely. In the far north, to this day, he is not averse to eating the colonist. He has had two chances: Nature, as before remarked, has given him a splendid country, and he has been brought into contact with a highly civilized race; but he has proved unworthy of both. His blood is therefore upon his own head. “ In saying this we do not, it need hardly be insisted, endorse all that has been meted out to the black by his white conqueror. The Briton was a savage once, and he is not an angel now. Beneath his civilization, there are the passions which may be developed into savagery; and there have been too many white savages in Australia. The line of contact between the two races is the line where Government, representing in this matter the conscience as well as the physical force of the whole community, should be strong, but where it has too frequently been weak. The Queensland Government should be strong in the administration of justice, tempered abundantly with mercy, along the line where white and black are struggling for supremacy, and not merely able to grapple with questions of tariffs and mail contracts in Brisbane. It is a disgrace to a civilized people to be represented by many of the ‘ boys ’ who are em ployed to hasten the extinction of their countrymen in the far north. The braining of children, the violation of women, the slaughter of the wounded and the aged, the callous disregard of all tender consi derations which, when observed, shed lustre on the strong—these are reproaches which it is humiliating to have recorded in any part of the British Empire. They make an Englishman’s blood boil with shame and indignation. War, whether of the open sort or of that unrecognized kind which ‘ disperses ’ black- fellows, is apt to demoralize those who are engaged in it, and what has been transpiring for years in the ‘ unsettled ’ districts of Australia has had that effect in too many cases. The business of ‘ dispersing ’ blackfellows has had the result of ‘dispersing’ the conscience of whitefellows. Troopers may have
