AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 113, 28 September 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

The unhappy condition of the Australian blacks was referred to by the Rev. C. E. Lefroy in a speech at Adelaide last week. lie' said that between 73,000 and 80.000 aborigines, according to moderate calculation, still survived, mostly in the northern parts of the continent. Would Australian people sit quietly by and watch them being swept along to their doom? The great majority of the community had no conception of the awful wrongs which aborigines had sutl'ered at the iiands of some white men. Some positive cruelty and callous neglect were being continued in the far-oil' and remote places right to the present time. There could not be a greater mistake than to suppose that it was all a thing of the past. He referred to the. famous report made only seven years ago by Dr. Roth to the West Australian Government concerning the treatment of aborigines in the north-west of that State. Dr. Roth's report had revealed, among other deplorable circumstances, such ter-

rible perversion of justice by the police that even up to the present time the Government of West Australia had not dared to make the report known to the Australian public; but lie believed that the general lot of the aborigines in the Northern Territory had been just as bad, only less was Known about it. As to Queensland; tne treatment meted out to the blacks' in that State had been the worst of all.