ALLEGED ATROCITIES IN AUSTRALIA.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3020, 1 March 1881, Page 3

ALLEGED ATROCITIES IN AUSTRALIA.

Under the head of " A New Method of Colonisation by the Anglo-Saxons," a report is going the round of the French and German papers which seems to us to demand tbe attention of the Colonial Office. It is contained in a letter from a correspondent to the Cologne Gazette, who has recently been in the north of Australia. At this moment, he states, in the north of Queensland civilisation is in conflict with the native blacks. At any time in the inns of Bowen, Townsville, Cooktown, you may hear people boasting of having killed so many blacks, declaring that to satisfy their conscience they always fire afc every black they see. Some time ago afc Cooktown, to punish some blacks who had thrown their spears at them ' while sailing along the coasfc, they had all the tribe men women and sucking children, massacred. The correspondent gives a conversation which he had with a police officer, who asked him to join a hunting excursion into the interior. The correspondent asked if ifc was a kangaroo hunt, and on being told ifc was he said he was afraid he was not a good enough horseman. The officer told him he had misapprehended, that there were no kangaroos in that region, and that it was a hunt of blacks he meant. The correspondent asked the officer if they were at war with the blacks. " Not exactly," the officer replied, " but we fire at the first native that falls in our way." The correspondent did not see anything very attractive about this, especially *as tho officer told him that the blacks had become so terrified at the whites that they fled whenever the latter came in sight. That the blacks are perfectly amenable to kindly treatment the officer himself admitted, and gave an instance of an Italian marquis who was recently able to live among the blacks on perfectly friendly terms, by simply treating them with ordinary humanity. So far as he can mnko out; the Australian natives in North Queensland have done nothing to merit anything bufc kind treatment; and, even if they have, it is surely not to be tolerated that a British Government or a British colony should sanction their extermination as if they were wild beasts. It is bad enough to take the country from them, without hunting them. into the bargain.—Pall Mall Gazette.