The land’s rightful owners, now wretched and poor,
Beg their morsels of food at their white brother’s door;
Those hunters who carolled so blythely at morn,
Now wander dejected, rejected, forlorn.
To their fathers the best and the bravest have gone,
And dark-eyed Zitella sits weeping alone—
And dark-eyed Zitella sits weeping alone!
Thus the aboriginal natives melted away like snow before the sun; from no congenial heat, but from the practices of inhuman selfishness.
What a contrast the European settlement in 1858! Scarce a black in existence for 3 miles, while the white population numbered 488,769 souls, with 4,000,000 sheep, 400,000 head of cattle, 184,000 horses, with imports and exports of £14,000,000 and £13,000,000 respectively, on the graveyard of the aborigines.
The earth was never intended to be kept waste, but the evil is as to the way of settling it—this is the perplexing question.