Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/211

 to this event, when a district was depopulated by an infliction of this kind, the vacancy was filled up from other parts which had not suffered; but now that the country is already in th« occupation of Europeans, that this does not take place. The very scanty population of the country when first discovered gives some colour to this supposition, as well as the fact stated by Captain Hunter, in his account of the formation of the settlement at Sydney, that they were then suffering under the small-pox. At the Mount House Protector's station, in 1842, the natives, who were there in great numbers, were generally suffering under inflammation of the lungs, accompanied by low fever, which caused great mortality amongst them, so much so that it was thought necessary to place a medical man on the establishment. This disease was still prevalent in 1844. These tribes lived more than two hundred miles from Melbourne, and being in one of those districts where aggressions on the whites had most frequently occurred, they had had but little intercourse with the settlers. I set this down at the time merely as an occasional epidemic, but I find that one of the Commissioners of Crown Lands speaks of a similar disease having been fatal amongst the Barabool tribe, near Geelong, in 1839. I find also from a work quoted below, that a disease exactly similar had followed the appearance of Europeans, not only in New Zealand, but in the South Sea Islands. It is also to be observed that, in Port Phillip at least, the white population did not, either before or after, suffer under this complaint.

In a work entitled "Polynesia," written by the Right Rev. M. Russell LL, D., that gentleman, alluding to