Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/103

98 all the pimble became so soft, that the poor starved kangaroos and cattle sank down to their bellies, and were unable to get up again, and so died in their tracks.

The cracked and dried-up yallums were filled to over flowing, and all the drooping trees and herbage, which had so nearly died from the effects of scorching rays of the angry sun, grew fresh once more, and all the land became green and beautiful. Thus what your missionaries with their music and talk altogether failed in, our bangals achieved at once through our good Ngondenout.

From the foregoing the reader can easily divine the difficulties and obstacles the missionaries and clergymen have to encounter in their endeavours to bring these poor savages to a sense of their utter heathenism. Their logic is simple even to childishness, but notwithstanding this fact it is most difficult to combat (baby logic and accompanying cross-questioning have posed most men some time or other in their lives); in fact, it is impossible in many instances to do so. It is only by giving them intellectual culture equal to that enjoyed by mediocre civilisation that they can be made to understand the utter fallaciousness of the faith which they place in their spirits and the truth and beauty of the Christian religion as accepted by so many thousands of earnest professors.

To endeavour to impart such mental culture as we here speak of, however, to the adult aboriginal would be a very hopeless task indeed; therefore it is only in the proper training of the children that anything like a good result can be looked for, and their inherent erratic nature will