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[centred] SHALL WE ADMIT THE BLACKS! [centred] No. 11 [centred] [COMMUNICATED.]
THE Provincial Committee is a most useful body, but in advocating a Crown colony it has almost entirely overlooked one of the strongest arguments in favour of it, and one likely to have more weight with the Widow of Albert the Good and the people of England than all the other reasons it can adduce—that is the treatment of the aboriginals of Northern Queensland by our most righteous Government. Every nation in the world has on its first occupation of any country done something to perpetuate its own institutions and propagate its own creed; but religion is beneath the concern of our high-minded councillors. Every Government has made education its first concern; but our Government School has more than once become a "voluntary" one, and gone begging on its own account. Our neighbours were long destined to behold their children growing up in blissful ignorance, whilst a visit from the district inspector was denied them; and the state of the Cape and Cardwell is too well known to need comment. Religion and education our illustrious senators have overlooked, but morals are still worse. Every Government declines to consider the question at all. Whilst taking no measures whatever for the recovery of the aboriginals, and utterly refusing to listen to any schemes for their benefit - refusing them protectors and teachers and schools, refusing beef to keep them from starvation and clothing to shelter them from the wintry winds - refusing to allot them a portion of country to themselves, where they might unmolested have secure hunting grounds, where the temptations to spear the squatters' cattle would be removed, where their gins would not be tampered with by the settlers and their children not be orphaned - what have they done? Stand afar off, ye shades of murdered fathers and dishonoured mothers, while we make allusion to it! We know the storm that was raised in England against Governor Eyre about the Jamaica riots, yet it is estimated that the whole sacrifice of life in Jamaica at that time did not exceed four hundred. What then will the people of England say when they learn that more than this number of natives fall each year in Queensland, partly by the hands of settlers and partly by a bloodthirsty native police so illegally constituted that they work with a halter round their necks. Where they "disperse" the blacks killing is no murder; no account is rendered, no inquiry held, and mystery enshrouds their deeds in distant solitude or in the dark recesses of the mangroves, where the groans of the dying reach no ears but those of the Lord of the Sabaoth [sic]. These monsters take a real pleasure in their work, and it is said of them that they have often dishonoured the widow beside the corpse of her murdered husband. We know that our own town at least had its foundations cemented in blood. As one episode in its early history it is told that a boat sighted a canoe with two natives and gave chase. The aboriginals, finding they were losing ground, jumped overboard: one gained the shore, the other having taken a wider offing was less fortunate, and after all other means to kill him had failed, the commandant, enraged, leant over the boat and battered out his brains with one of the beams, the only weapon at hand. Our Brisbane Government may in this and a thousand other cases file no bill, but for all that we will not "let the dead rest." What their employés may have done is far outdone by what they have permitted others to do. The most humanely disposed squatters - induced by their example, and forgetting after an experience of years that such fear as was inspired by the ferocious doings of the native police did not prevent crime any more than our old prison system reformed criminals, or our old method of treatment recovered lunatics - took the law into their own hands in the blood of the blacks. Others less humanely disposed entered on a complete war of extermination, sparing none of the ill-fated race. One person is reported as having tied two gins together and having made one ball serve for both; and the sole survivor of a mob of twenty-three aboriginals is located on a station in the North. Another has often boastingly exhibited his revolver covered with notches, each representing a murdered gin or blackfellow; and it is now matter of public notoriety that not long ago 120 aboriginals disappeared on two occasions for ever from the native records of Queensland. The minds of many familiar with these details, and worse than these, have at last become [so sickened by them]
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ago 120 aboriginals disappeared on two occasions for ever from the native records of Queensland. The minds of many familiar with these details, and worse than these, have at last become so sickened by them that a movement has spread abroad for their admission to the stations and the towns as one of the remedies for these evils, and the discovery has suddenly been made that if they choose to come into the towns we cannot help admitting them. How then has this movement for their admission originated? Now that it is un fait accompli there are so many claimants for the honour that it is hard to decide between them. The evidence, however, would seem to preponderate in favour of a station not 100 miles from the Burdekin. That it stood foremost in slaughtering the blacks and admitting the gins there can be no doubt. There have long been rumours of cruel doings there, but the last is not the least. Without the means of learning better they may have been troublesome, but they have paid a heavy penalty. The gins were admitted, whilst the few surviving husbands had to stand afar off gazing with longing eyes from the mangroves at their white tormentors living promiscuously with their wives and (proh! pudor!) little daughters. Germany has its Swedenborgians, England has its Agapemons, the Western States their Society of Free Lovers, and why should not this station throw open its halls and allow of unrestrained intercourse between the sexes? The revolver could silence all aboriginal grumblers, and blackfellows have no souls. But murder will out, and immorality on such a wholesale scale as this cannot long be concealed. We shall soon learn who is responsible for all this, as an appeal to the Home Government on this question is now as a last resource about to be made, and we fervently hope a Crown colony will be the result.
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A shocking and misterious [sic] incident is