Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/33

Rh strength. In Robinson's time there were 16 tribes still in being, and he says it had come to his knowledge that several others that were extant 15 or 20 years before he wrote (Report, 27th July, 1830) were extinct then (that is, they were in existence in about 1810 to 1815). On the South Coast alone, lie enumerates by name five that have died out, besides several others in the east, whom he does not name. Of the districts of the north, or the interior, he at that time knew nothing. Many of the tribes that were known to the early colonists numbered from 400 to 600 persons, and if there were 20 or 25 tribes existent then, 7,000 can hardly be an exaggerated estimate. If 500 of these were killed defensively by the settlers, or aggressively by the sealers and bushrangers, we may be assured that it is an outside number. A very few hundreds were made prisoners.

Indeed all reliable evidence, of which there is plenty extant, shows that what they suffered from the whites has been most grieviously exaggerated, and by no one so much, but in general statements only, as by Mr. Robinson himself; for he gives not the smallest proof of it, except in the instance of the sealers, and hardly once names the bushrangers. But he adduces abundant examples of murders by the blacks—the "poor helpless, forlorn, oppressed blacks," as he calls the one race, and the "merciless white" the other—expressions he so often uses, without the least proof of their applicability to either race, that one sickens of their repetition. From all that I can learn, by the attentive perusal of a vast mass of documentary evidence, I do not believe even as many as 500 of them were killed, and about that number made prisoners. Of the assumed number, 7,000, who were in the colony in 1803 and 1804, at least 6,000 must have died at their own encampments, from causes not induced by war, except tribal wars. These latter, taken singly, though not very bloody, produced collectively a large number of deaths. Their rapid declension after the colony was founded is traceable, as far as our proofs allow us to judge, to the prevalence of epidemic disorders; which, though not introduced by the Europeans, were possibly accidentally increased by them. The naked savage soon discovered the comforts of covering, and such things as blankets and clothing were often given them by the settlers, or were distributed amongst them by the Government in large quantities; and in their almost countless hut robberies they never failed of taking away every blanket they found there.