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 CHAPTER VII.

board our ship, in the voyage to Western Australia, there had been an intermediate passenger who was returning thither after a few years' residence in England, and whom I often interrogated concerning the natives of the new country to which we were sailing. I was curious to know whether the "aborigines," as they are now styled, whom Captain Cook would in his older time have called "Indians," were capable of being taught and improved, and our shipmate answered that they could learn extremely well, "though it was but labour lost to educate them, as they were no sooner of an age to marry than they would run away from their instructors, and be off again to the bush." He added that the Roman Catholics had done more for the natives, and had obtained a greater