The natives about Sidney and Paramatta are represented as in a state of wretchedness still more deplorable than those resident in the interior.
“Those in the vicinity of Sidney are so completely changed, they scarcely have the same pursuits now; they go about the streets begging their bread, and begging for clothing and rum. From the diseases introduced among them, the tribes in immediate connexion with those large towns almost became extinct; not more than two or three remained, when I was last in New South Wales, of tribes which formerly consisted of 200 or 300.”
Dr. Lang, the minister of the Scotch church, writes, “From the prevalence of infanticide, from intemperance, and from European diseases, their number is evidently and rapidly diminishing in all the older settlements of the colony, and in the neighbourhood of Sidney especially, they present merely the shadow of what were once numerous tribes.” Yet even now “he thinks their number within the limits of the colony of New South Wales cannot be less than 10,000—an indication of what must once have been the population, and what the destruction. It is only,” Dr. Lang observes, “through the influence of Christianity, brought to bear upon the natives by the zealous exertions of devoted missionaries, that the progress of extinction can be checked.”
Enormous as are these evils, it would be well if they stopped here; but the moral corruption of our penal colonies overflows, and is blown by the winds, like the miasma of the plague, to other shores, and threatens with destruction one of the fairest scenes of human regeneration and human happiness to which we can turn on this huge globe of cruelty for hope and consolation. Where is the mind that has not dwelt in its young enthusiasm on the summer beauty of the Islands of the Pacific? That has not, from the day that Captain Cook first fell in with them, wandered in imagination with our voyagers and missionaries through their fairy scenes—been wafted in some magic bark over those blue and bright seas—been hailed to the sunny shore by hundreds of simple and rejoicing people—been led into the hut overhung with glorious tropical flowers, or seated beneath the palm, and feasted on the pine and the bread-fruit? These are the things which make part of the poetry of our memory and our youth. There is not a man of the slightest claims to the higher and better qualities of our nature to whom the existence of these oceanic regions of beauty has not been a subject of delightful thought, and a source of genial inspiration. Here in fancy—
The white man landed!—need the rest be told?
The New World stretched its dusk hand to the old;
Each was to each a marvel, and the tie
Of wonder warmed to better sympathy.
Kind was the welcome of the sun-born sires,
And kinder still their daughters’ gentler fires.