Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/72

64 mere occasional, but very general failing, amongst the women; and prostitution, all the world over, vitiates the powers of the females, wholly obstructing production. Robinson always enumerates the sexes of the individual she took, and distinguishes between childhood, adolescence, and manhood; and, as a general thing, found scarcely any children amongst them, and quite reversely of the natural condition of our race adultness was found to outweigh infancy in a remarkable degree everywhere. In the present instance his capture was found to consist of sixteen men, nine women, and one child.

The well-known doctrine of Strezelecki that the savage woman, after contamination by the white, is invariably and for ever infertile, is only an amusing fiction, instances of the contrary having occurred, both in New South Wales and Tasmania, in cases where I presume the cohabitation was not a very protracted one. Nor can the decadence I have spoken of be traced to infanticide, at any rate of children of their own blood, of whom the mother was passionately fond; though it seems possible that the peculiar exigencies of their state may have sometimes produced a forced, but certainly most unwilling abandonment of them. Instances of infanticide did, indeed, come within Robinson's knowledge; but then the victims were half castes, whom the savage women both of Australia and Tasmania, is known to have detested. In one of the cases in question a mother suffocated two of her offspring by thrusting grass into their mouths till they died. (Report 13th May, 1831.) In concluding his account of this cruel tragedy, he says:—"The aboriginal females in the Straits do not entertain an equal degree of fondness for those children who they have derived from Europeans, in confirmation of which several facts are on record." And he adds, in reference to these murders "this circumstance is borne out by the united testimony of the aboriginal women of the establishment." (Swan Island). But this subject will be treated of hereafter.

The removal of this horde of depredators and professional murderers, from whom the colonists had suffered more than all the rest, was a very eminent service. It is not indeed easy to understand its value now that the large majority of those who were the objects of their craft and passions have passed away by death or emigration; but any one whose recollections, like my own, will carry him back to the period I am writing of, or who will take the trouble to read through the accounts of the crimes of this people, written at the time, and printed in the early publications of the colony, or preserved in at least a thousand M.S. reports, chiefly from the police magistrates of the territory, will be made to comprehend that the capture of these two tribes was