Page:Feilberg.djvu/36

Rh have in numberless instances stood faithfully to them in hardship, danger, and sickness; but as such a project, to ensure a degree of success, requires the devotion of the lives of such men as the Moravian missionaries, together with an outlay of some money and the countenance and assistance of the Government there seems little hopes of anything being done in the matter. In a late letter appearing in your columns "Outis" proposes to make the blacks work.

The idea is a good one, but how are we to get them to work? The plan of bringing them down from Western stations to work on the roast under Ceylon overseers is manifestly absurd. To get any good out of blacks they should be kept as much apart as possible from the whites, with he exception of those who have control over them. They should have large reservations allotted to them, consisting of tracts of good hunting country. A reliable and devoted man, salaried by the Government and thoroughly understanding the nature of blacks, should be associated with missionaries, if they can be got, willing to undertake the care of these creatures, and a system of management might be organised to work pretty well. Numberless objections may, of course, be urged to such a plan, one of which is the difficulty of obtaining a body of men content to sacrifice their time and efforts for the hope that a few of the offspring of their charges may turn out pretty respectable members of society. Another is the expense and the difficulty of getting official support for a scheme of this nature. A third objection is the keeping away of whites from the black flock; a fourth the eradication of vices already acquired from white men and grafted on a soil peculiarly suited to their culture. Although unprepared to combat all these objections and hosts of others which may be offered, I would point out to any who take an interest in the aboriginals, that there are large tracts of country in the Cook district, unfitted for graziers or gold miners, which might with propriety be turned into reservations for blacks. These lands teem with game, and their rivers with fish. The aboriginals on these tracts, moreover, have never come into what is termed friendly contact with white men, which I take it is the worst form of kindness to their race. Above all, these districts abound in a tree known as the cotton tree, which produces some hundreds or thousands of bales of beautiful long-stapled cotton yearly. Now, some time ago when in Java I remarked that this tree was carefully cultivated there, and on enquiry I found that the cotton was much valued for stuffing quilts and many other purposes, and was largely exported to Europe; and I was further much struck with the poor and dwarfed appearance of the trees as compared to the grand specimens abounding in our own colony. Now, if the Dutch can export this cotton with a profit, why cannot we? The gathering of it would be work essentially suited to blacks, and the profits from sales might be devoted to supporting some scheme for their welfare.

White men would be useless to collect this natural production in sufficient quantities. Blacks, on the other hand, would be in their element at such employment, and when wandering from tree to tree through the forest, combining a congenial kind of work with the pleasure of hunting, the aboriginal's soul would not fret, as it invariably does when put to steady labor.

I offer the foregoing suggestions, not because I have any hope of seeing them carried out, but because, just, at this particular time, the blood of the slain blackfellow is shrieking out unusually loud in the columns of your paper, and attention may be thereby called to them.—Yours, &c.,

—Queenslander, June 5, 1880.

,—Having had some fourteen years experience among Queensland blacks, both on inside and outside country, you will perhaps allow me a word on the "Black versus White" controversy.

I am quite aware that at times terrible outrages have been perpetrated on the blacks both by the police and by brutal "white savages;" and I have tried hard to bring to justice one of the latter who deliberately poisoned a number of blacks; but no white man's (i.e., sworn) evidence of the crime being procurable, the then Attorney-General refused to take any action upon the matter. From this you will see that I am ready and anxious to protect blacks from wanton molestation, but I most strongly deprecate the course you are taking in publishing to the world at large a list of horrible atrocities of which you have heard—and as neither names nor dates are given, it is impossible either to verify or contradict them; but even granting that they may be all true, and granting that there is only one side to each