Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/13

8 decline, together with almost countless disarrangements of a pulmonary character; whilst yet another phase of this fell disease is the wasting away of the tissues, until the frame becomes attenuation personified.

Another potent cause of increased mortality since the advent of Europeans is due to the unwise habit they have of dressing and living as white men do, for months together; then, all at once, just as the freak takes them, they discard the clothes and the regular living to which they have become accustomed, don their opossum cloak or blanket, and betake themselves to their tribes, to their primitive loondthals, and hard fare, in a fit condition to contract any epidemic that may chance to be hovering about the camp, certain at least to have their joints racked by rheumatism, if they escape inflammation of the lungs. This last runs a very short course with the aborigines—a few days' violent cough, then hipitizationhepitization [sic], after which a brief day or two brings the end.

By comparison with the small remnant now exisitingexisting [sic] the population was numerous, prior to European colonisation; but even at that time it was but a modicum of what the colony could easily have sustained without having recourse to other than the primitive methods then in force for gaining a livelihood; but their endless tribal feuds kept the increase of population continually in check. Thus it was, to use a colonialism, that the country was never at any time peopled up to its carrying capacity. These feuds never by any chance took the shape of battles; cowardice, and self-preservation, being too largely developed in the aboriginal character for that; but massacres, with their attendant horrors, were