Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/50

42 looking at the hills of the main land, which in cleae whether were visible from Flinders Island. But after years of confinement at the Wyba-Luma settlement, they lost hope and fell into apathy.

After retiring from the office of commandant of Flinders, Robinson settled in the colony of Victoria; where for many years he was chief protector of aborigines. He was a native of London, I believe, and died a very few years ago at Bath, in comfortable, but I understand, not affluent circumstances.

Little more remains to be said of the natives but what is unpleasant to relate.

On the retirement of this most useful and energetic man from the public service of Tasmania, it was difficult to meet with a fitting successor for the office he had tilled, and impossible to find one like himself. Such servants are not to be replaced. Persons of better education there were plenty, but who lacked the qualities he possessed in so great a degree, to guide, instruct, and attach the natives to his person. His successors were not of his mould at all, and some of them had no love for anything relating to the duties of their pastoral and paternal office, except its emoluments; and all that he had done for them was rapidly undone. And those who saw the aborigines after their removal from Wyba-Luma to Oyster Cove could never believe them to be part of the same people, who ten years before had given such goodly proof of rapid emergence from barbarity.

A plausible successor of Robinson's, a man of the pseudo dilettante class (a class that flourishes very luxuriantly in Tasmanian soil), probably sick of his isolation, persuaded the headstrong Governor of the colony to transplant the black establishment from Wyba-Luma to Oyster Cove; the worst and most dangerous neighbourhood that could have been selected in all Tasmania. Nothing could surpass the general sterility of the soil of this place (except five or six acres of it) or the moral taint of its atmosphere, its neighbourhood being then inhabited only by woodcutters, who (particularly in those days) contained some of the worst and lowest of our population amongst them. This removal, as I think I have said before, took place in about 1847. Their retrogression was pretty well fulfilled before they quitted their asylum in the Straits, but here their recession into something worse than their original barbarity took place. The apathy into which they had been permitted to sink from neglect of cultivation prevented any recurrence to their old predatory habits, for they had now hardly life and spirit left for action beyond excursions to the public-house whenever they could raise the means, either by the sale of necklaces (or worse practises) or the