ABORIGINALS IN QUEENSLAND.

Dunstan Times, Issue 789, 1 June 1877, Page 3

ABORIGINALS IN QUEENSLAND.

The Warwick Examiner relates the following as the result of supplying aboriginals with drink, at Farm Creek, Southern Queensland: —“A tribe of blacks had been for some time engaged in that locality clearing the scrub, in order that the land could be turned into use. They were remunerated by having a regular supply of rations and tobacco given to them, and after they had cleared a certain area they were to be paid in money. They finished their work, and were paid their balance in cash. While they were idle they decided to hold a corrohoree, and to make it enjoyable to themselves they determined to obtain grog by some means or other. For this purpose three of them started across country to a bush public house, and returned with (as our informant states) 13 bottles. All this was consumed in one night by six blackfellows, and as the . grog began to take effect upon the semisavages they commenced fighting, using knives to one another. Night was made hideous with their yells and the cries of the gins ; and in the morning a hideous sight of wounded blacks, half-mad with drink and passion, and bleeding from the deep cuts and gashes they had given one another, with pools of blood on the ground on which they lay, presented itself. The result is what might have been expected ; one blackfellow has died from the injuries received ; and another, the one who inflicted them, has, since the effects of the drink have died away and the nature of the injuries he caused been made known to him, severed his windpipe, and there is little chance of his recovering. The black who has fallen a victim to this scene of savagery is said to have been tolerably civilised. He was an industrious fellow and an expert stockman, and was well known and much liked on the stations of Acacia Creek ai d Koreelay, and in the districts of Killarney and Farm Creek. It is further said that it was owing to his declining to join in the drunken revelry that one of the blacks crept up behind him, and inflicted a frightful gash ou the back part of his leg.”