Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/81

 with these sons of nature, much depends upon tact and firmness, and even more upon a thorough mutual understanding of aims and objects. The desire to appropriate is as inveterate in the black as, according to our police, it is in the white, and this impulse is perhaps the most fertile of all occasions of differences. A large property, of a nature kindred to blankets and tomahawks, fishhooks and bead necklaces, and a small party to defend it, forms a sad stumbling-block in the way of aboriginal virtues. The kindness shown by the Cooper's Creek natives to King, the survivor of Burke's party, as well as their sympathizing lament over the body of Burke, are pleasing and encouraging traits. A persistently hostile character like that of Keri Keri, encountered at Lake Massacre, a kind of Australian Hannibal, as he seemed, in his mortal antipathy to those intruding Romans, the colonists, seems the exception to the general rule.

Cannibalism is now but a too well ascertained custom of these Aborigines. New Zealand and Fiji afford analogous and perfectly authenticated confirmation of such customs, as well as New Caledonia. The report or rather confession of the Lake Massacre natives that they had dug up and eaten the body of Gray, another of Burke's party, who had died of fatigue on the return route, is not at all unlikely to be true. Nor is it