It says: “These people, unoffending as they were towards us, have, as might have been expected, suffered in an aggravated degree from the planting amongst them of our penal settlements. In the formation of these settlements it does not appear that the territorial rights of the natives were considered, and very little care has since been taken to protect them from the violence or the contamination of the dregs of our countrymen.
“The effects have consequently been dreadful beyond example, both in the diminution of their numbers and in their demoralization.”
Mr. Bannister, late attorney-general for that colony, says in his recent work, “British Colonization and the Coloured Tribes,”—“In regard to New South Wales, some disclosures were made by the secretary of the Church Missionary Society, Mr. Coates, and by others, that are likely to do good in the pending inquiries concerning transportation; and if that punishment is to be continued, it would be merciful to destroy all the natives by military massacre, as a judge of the colony once coolly proposed for a particular district, rather than let them be exposed to the lingering death they now undergo. But half the truth was not told as to New South Wales. Military massacres have been probably more common there than elsewhere; in 1826, Governor Darling ordered such massacres—and in consequence, one black native, at least, was shot at a stake in cool blood. The attorney-general of the colony[80] remonstrated against illegal orders of this kind, and was told that the secretary of state’s instructions authorized them.”
Lord Glenelg, however, adopted in his despatch to Sir James Stirling in 1835 a very different language, in consequence of an affair on the Murray River. “The natives on this river, in the summer of the year 1834, murdered a British soldier, having in the course of the previous five years killed three other persons. In the month of October, 1834, Sir James Stirling, the governor, proceeded with a party of horse to the Murray River, in search of the tribe in question. On coming up with them, it appears that the British horse charged this tribe without any parley, and killed fifteen of them, not, as it seems, confining their vengeance to the actual murderers.” After the rout, the women who had been taken prisoners were dismissed, having been informed, “that the punishment had been inflicted because of the misconduct of the tribe; that the white men never forget to punish murder; that on this occasion the women and children had been spared; but if any other persons should be killed by them, not one would be allowed to remain on this side of the mountains.”
That is, these white men, “who never forget to punish murder,” would, if another person was killed by the natives, commit a wholesale murder, and drive the natives out of one other portion of their country. Lord Glenelg, however, observed that it would be necessary that inquiry should be made whether some act of harshness or injustice had not originally provoked the enmity of the natives, before such massacres could be justified. His language is not only just, but very descriptive of the cause of these attacks from the natives.
“It is impossible to regard such conflicts without regret and anxiety, when we recollect how fatal, in too many instances, our colonial settlements have proved to the natives of the places where they have been formed; and this too by a series of conflicts in every one of which it has been asserted, and apparently with justice, that the immediate aggression has not been on our side. The real causes of these hostilities are to be found in a course of petty encroachments and acts of injustice committed by the new settlers, at first submitted to by the natives, and not sufficiently checked in the outset by the leaders of the colonists. Hence has been generated in the minds of the injured party a deadly spirit of hatred and vengeance, which breaks out at length into deeds of atrocity, which, in their turn, make retaliation a necessary part of self-defence.”[81]
It is some satisfaction that the recent inquiries have led to the appointment of a protector of the Aborigines, but who shall protect them from the multitudinous evils which beset them on all sides from their intercourse with the whites—men expelled by the laws from their own country for their profligacy, or men corrupted by contact with the plague of their presence? Grand individual massacres, and cases of lawless aggression, such as occasioned the abandonment of the colony at Raffles’ Bay, on the northern coast of Australia, where for the trifling offence of the theft of an axe, the sentinels were ordered to fire on the natives whenever they approached, and who yet were found by Captain Barker, the officer in command when the order for the abandonment of the place arrived, to be “a mild and merciful race of people;” such great cases of violence may be prevented, or reduced in number, but what ubiquitous protector is to stand between the natives and the stock-keepers (convicts in the employ of farmers in the outskirts of the colony), of the cedar-cutters, the bush-rangers, and free settlers in the remote and thinly cultivated districts?—a race of the most demoralized and fearful wretches on the face of the earth, and who will shoot a native with the same indifference as they shoot a kangaroo. Who shall protect them from the diseases and the liquid fire which these penal colonies have introduced amongst them? These are the destroying agencies that have compelled our government to commit one great and flagrant act of injustice to remedy another—actually to pursue, run down, and capture, as you would so many deer in a park, or as the Gauchos of the South American Pampas do wild cattle with their lassos, the whole native population of Van Dieman’s land; and carry them out of their own country, to Flinder’s Island? Yes, to save these wretched people from the annihilation which our moral corruption and destitution of all Christian principle were fast bringing upon them, we have seized and expelled them all from their native land. What a strange alternative, between destruction by our violence and our vices, and the commission of an act which in any other part or age of the world would be regarded as the most wicked and execrable. We have actually turned out the inhabitants of Van Dieman’s Land, because we saw that it was “a goodly heritage,” and have comfortably sate down in it ourselves; and the best justification that we can set up is, that if we did not pass one general sentence of transportation upon them, we must burn them up with our liquid fire, poison them with the diseases with which our vices and gluttony have covered us, thick as the quills on a porcupine, or knock them down with our bullets, or the axes of our wood-cutters! What an indescribable and monstrous crime must it be in the eye of the English to possess a beautiful and fertile island,—that the possessors shall be transported as convicts to make way for the convicts from this kingdom who have been pronounced by our laws too infamous to live here any longer! To such a pass are we come, that the Jezebel spirit of our lawless cupidity does not merely tell us that it will give us a vineyard, but whatever country or people we lust after.
We have then, totally cleared Van Dieman’s Land of what Colonel Arthur himself, an agent of this sweeping expulsion of a whole nation, calls “a noble-minded race,”[82] and have reduced the natives of New Holland, so far as we have come in contact with them, to misery.
This is the evidence given by Bishop Broughton:—“They do not so much retire as decay; wherever Europeans meet with them, they appear to wear out, and gradually to decay: they diminish in numbers; they appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth. I am led to apprehend that within a very limited period, a few years,” adds the Bishop, “those who are most in contact with Europeans will be utterly extinct—I will not say exterminated—but they will be extinct.”
As to their moral condition, the bishop says of the natives around Sidney—“They are in a state which I consider one of extreme degradation and ignorance; they are, in fact, in a situation much inferior to what I suppose them to have been before they had any communication with Europe.” And again, in his charge, “It is an awful, it is even an appalling consideration, that, after an intercourse of nearly half a century with a Christian people, these hapless human beings continue to this day in their original benighted and degraded state. I may even proceed farther, so far as to express my fears that our settlement in their country has even deteriorated a condition of existence, than which, before our interference, nothing more miserable could easily be conceived. While, as the contagion of European intercourse has extended itself among them, they gradually lose the better properties of their own character, they appear in exchange to acquire none but the most objectionable and degrading of ours.”