Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/19

 INTRODUCTION. ix the end they all had in view. Between the years 1821 and 1842, in New South Wales alone, £80,000 was spent in maintaining protectorates of the natives, and in trying to redeem them from barbarism. This large expenditure was unfruitful, and resulted in complete failure. The Aborigines of that portion of Australia (at least the comparatively few who remain) are no better now than their forefathers were, and no farther advanced on the road to civilisation. Wherever they have come into contact with white men, they have contracted many of their vices, without acquiring in any profitable degree such habits as would assist in raising them from their degraded condition. They have disappeared almost entirely except in the interior. The extinction of the native races in the adjoining colony of Victoria and their general condition is much the same, and it is the same all through the settled districts of Eastern Australia.* The South Australian natives form no exception to the rule. In many parts of that portion of the continent to which these pages specially refer they have entirely disappeared. Not a vestige of the Port Adelaide tribe remains. The Adelaide tribe is extinct, and so are those which dwelt near Gawler, Kapunda, the Burra, the Rufus, &c. In none of these places can a single trace of them be found. † They have left no memorials behind them, and their language as a language exists no more. Some relics of it have been preserved in the glossaries of Teichelmann, Wyatt, Eyre, &c., whose love for science or whose curiosity led them to make notes of words, &c., as their intercourse with the natives permitted, but for the rest it is as if the Adelaide tribes had never existed. At one time there were native schools in Adelaide and other places, and a training institution near Port Lincoln for the blacks, which was subsidised by the Government. The native schools, like those who attended them, have passed away, and are males and 540 females. There is no return from New South Wales. † The extinction is so complete that it was with the greatest difficulty that Mr. Waterhouse, the curator of the Museum, could collect a set of their weapons for the Paris Exhibition in the present year (1878).
 * According to the last census there were only 1330 blacks in Victoria784