With hope in every rustling fold,
We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.’
“No, the (five) star-drop flag of Australia, heralding the (three) star-drop (whisky) of the advancing army of locust-squatters, brings no hope, or mercy either, to the poor devils whose ancestral domains become their fields of unceasing and ‘unpaid toil.’ All the horrors depicted by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, all the sorrows sung of by the immortal Whittier, are rampant around me as I write. And it seems that it is in vain that the immorality of the horrible traffic is thundered into the ears of the various Governments—who after all are but the representatives of the squatter-kings—by various southern papers from time to time. Read the following first-rate article upon the subject, by Mr. Rose, the editor of the Brisbane Courier, the boss paper of the colony, which appeared on September 16th, last year.
“‘Communications that have lately reached us from the north show too clearly that our people have not yet been educated to the recognition of the human rights of the original possessors of Australia. A correspondent forwards descriptions of atrocities of alleged frequent occurrence in the northern districts, the bare recital of which is enough to make one’s ears to tingle. Nor are we allowed the common consolation of ignorance or sentimentalism or exaggeration on the part of our informer. For our correspondent is a well-known pressman, who has done a bit of exploiting both in Australasia and New Guinea, who admits that he has himself shot natives who would otherwise have shot him, and of whom we can readily believe that, as he says, he is “not particularly prejudiced in favour of the natives or very soft-hearted.” He even tells us that he is not himself a religious man, and yet declares that he would not think the future commonly assigned to the wicked by religious people as too condign a punishment for atrocities that have come within his knowledge. His indictment touches mainly the districts lying between Cairns and Georgetown, where, he says, the blacks are being decimated, and by Government servants in the shape of black troopers and their masters, whose “dispersion” of the aboriginals in particular localities has simply come to mean their slaughter. He speaks of men being kept for the sole purpose of hunting and killing the aborigines; he gives instances of their camps being surrounded, and men, women, and children massacred for killing cattle, when, through the white man’s presence, they could no longer find game; and he tells in detail one story of the extermination of a camp simply because some blacks had been seen passing a mining station where nothing had been stolen for months. Roundly he charges the “grass dukes” and their subordinates with “murdering, abducting children for immoral purposes, and stockwhipping defenceless girls,” and he condemns “each Government that comes into power for winking at the slaughter of our black fellow-subjects of the Queen as an easy way of getting rid of the native question.” The Northern Miner asserts that this picture is not overdrawn, and that the atrocities mentioned have even been exceeded. It refers to squatters branding blacks, keeping harems of black gins, and finding their slaughtering record no bar to advancement to high office in the State. The black trooper system is, in the view of this paper, legalized murder, which reckons the life of a bullock of more account than that of a score of black fellows. We do not vouch for the truth of these serious charges; but, if true, the horrible demoralisation of such a system on blacks and whites alike it is difficult to over-estimate; and cry exaggeration as we may, it is clear that enough remains to call for the immediate and earnest attention of the Government. Sir Thomas McIlwraith will earn the gratitude of the colony to all time if he will but exert himself for the aborigines of Australia—whose country after all we have simply taken from them by force—as Sir Samuel Griffith exerted himself for the kanakas. Surely there is as much call for a Commission of Inquiry in the one case as in the other. The recently inaugurated society for the protection of the aborigines has its work cut out for it, and has not been formed a moment too soon. We hope that the statements we have referred to will waken our people to the fact that there is a much louder call and a great deal more room for this kind of protection than is commonly supposed. We must add that the Northern Miner, referring to the circumstance that the Americans have tried to stay the extinction of their aborigines by granting them large reserves, scattered all over the western states, pleads, and surely with reason, that a similar course should be followed with ours. We can do it more easily now than it can be done in future generations. Most of their vices, and the very thefts for which they are so terribly punished, come from the contact with the whites into which they are driven by want, and an occasional outburst of not unnatural vengeance. If the Aborigines’ Protection Association will add this to the otherwise admirable programme of their operations—if indeed it is not already practically included—published by us the other day, and set themselves vigorously to carry their plans into effect, they will earn the gratitude alike of whites and blacks, and aid in removing a stain which will otherwise blot and burn into our future history.’
“Mr. Feder, my missionary friend, who gave me this newspaper clipping, says that Thadeus O’Kane, the proprietor-editor of another influential paper, the Northern Miner, has taken up the subject warmly at various times, but with little or no good resulting therefrom.
“But although I know that,—
‘The age is dull and mean. Men creep,
Not walk; with blood too pale and tame
To pay the debt they owe to shame,’
and that this community is too much enfeebled by its tropic habitat to make an energetic move against the shocking system that its landholders have introduced, even if it wished to do so, yet I am at a loss to understand why that spirit of the age, Trade Unionism, has not risen against this slave business. Surely Labour, whose power, at any rate, in the southern parts of Australia is immense, must be aware of the benefit that must accrue to white workmen if the ‘unpaid labour’ of the blacks, now forced to work by squatters and others, were made illegal. Chinamen and kanakas are hounded down by the Australian working-man with a certain amount of reason, for beastly immorality, combined with Oriental diseases, are things to be avoided in a young colony, where all men should be healthy voters and thinkers. But why should the ‘horny-handed’ keep silent when the paths of labour are clogged by the slave system,—which obtains, I believe, over a large and growing portion of Australia,—and yet shriek wildly when coloured labour of another sort competes with them at a wage only a little less than that demanded by whites?