DISAPPEARING BLACKS

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 128, 3 June 1919, Page 2

DISAPPEARING BLACKS

PLEA FOR BETTER TREATMENT.

(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) SYDNEY, 21st May. A movement has been started in South Australia for the hotter treatment of the Australian aborigines, who arc steadily declining in numbers and deteriorating in health, and who now do not number more than 150,000 in all Australia. j Attempts to "civilise" the black have j failed completely. In a few cases, theso blacks have been educated and proved capable of practising a profession, but with the mass of them nothing of that kind can bo done. The New Zealand 'Maori, i}ot being far removed from tho whites, accepts education and becomes a farmer, trader, doctor, or politician equal to the European; but the Australian black, being: lower in the human scale, simply withers away along tho advancing edge of civilisation. Some bitter things were said at the South Australian meeting which started the movement. The white people had come, killed off the native game, taken tho best of the lands, and had left to the blacks the alternatives of adopting "civilisation" or going out into the wilderness and starving. The blacks, who had formerly lived, free and healthy, in tho fruitful regions along the coasts, now oxisted liko parasites along the edges of tho towns, getting an allowance from tho Government, and dying like flics from venereal diseases. They, like all primitive peoples, wore terribly subject to tho white man's diseases. Even tho "wild" blacks, which now wander freo through Central and North Australia, aro suffering from these plagues. It was suggested thaV Australia should now do what in common justice should have been done early in last century—set aside a wide area of suitable country where the blacks might live in their native state, without molestation. It would also be necessary now to establish lock hospitals, *for tho segregation and treatment of tho diseased. One speaker, who had wandered through empty Australia, eaid that the natives about the towns were a lazy, contented lot. But in the M'Donnell Ranges, in Central Australia, he met a better class of natives—smart, keen, and useful with stock. It was there that he first actually saw tho "squaw men"—"komboes" they were called in the north"—that wa-s to say, white men living among black women in what might be called a patriarchal mannjr. The miners on the White Range had quite a. large staff of gins and blackfellows. They helped the whites in the mines, and occasionally, when liquor arrived, they nursed their white lords through the pangs of a very severe recovery. He knew of no case, in those isolated districts, of the whites having treated the blaoks cruelly.