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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 be-
hold 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 Govern-
ment declines to consider the question at
all. Whilst taking no measures whatever
for the recovery of the aboriginals, and ut-
terly 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 shel-
ter 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 blood-
thirsty 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 render-
ed, no inquiry held, and mystery en-
shrouds 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 founda-
tions 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 pre-
vent crime any more than our old prison
system reformed criminals, or our old me-
thod 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 extermina-
tion, 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 co-
vered 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 oc-
casions 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]