Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/35

 INTRODUCTION. xxv were known, and could have been accurately defined. The right of occupying, parcelling out and disposing of the soil, was asserted as the first principle of the colonisation of the country, without the slightest regard to any rights, except those which were exercised by the Crown. Without the land the aboriginal native could not exist; the land was taken from him and he ceased to exist. In order to provide a substitute for the large territory which melted from him imperceptibly almost, and certainly without any power of prevention on his part, it would have been necessary to restrain his wandering habits, to make him industrious and sensible alike of the value as well as the advantage of accumulating something. This has not been done up to the present day, and in spite of all that has been attempted in the shape of christianising and teaching them, the best of the natives who are left are still savage, but only less savage than their forefathers, because their country no longer offers the scope for their pristine barbarism. It has been urged that if special tracts of country had been set apart for the occupation of the natives, the race might have been preserved. A little consideration will show this to rest on a slender foundation only. For an immense territory like that of South Australia, the native population was remarkably small, and, in their own estimation, not calculated to maintain any large increase in numbers, Their customs of mutilation, infanticide and cannibalism, lessened, and were no doubt intended to prevent, the growth of the tribes. The marriage customs operated in the same way. It seems, therefore, an inevitable conclusion, that if the tribes had been restricted to more circumscribed areas in which to live than had been the case before the white men came, the process of extinction would have been carried on faster amongst themselves, or else they must have become, as they did become, dependent on the whites, with the results which have already overtaken them. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of South Australia are perhaps not more to blame for the catastrophe than are other races of men who have supplanted savages in their birth-places. The process seems to be invariably the same everywhere. The land is the