THE DECAY OF THE ABORIGINALS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2244, 25 November 1886, Page 3

THE DECAY OF THE ABORIGINALS.

j (Thames Star.) It is curious to watch upon a New Zealand pasture, how, after the scattering of English grass seed, the native grass dies out. There is little need to root it up ; the more vigorous vitality from Britain renders the very evistenee of the native grass impossible. It is very much the same with the aboriginals of the Colonies. When the first European settlers set food upon Australia, now nearly a ceutury ago, the natives were probably fully as numerous as the whites are now. They were to be found along the extensive coast line, and were in many places very numerous, A great; change ha-< now come over them. In Tasmania they are aheady extinct ; in all Victoria there are less than 1000 ; in New South Wales probably not more than 2000. In New Zealand, where there exists a far finer type altogether— in height, in strength, and in intellect— still there is the same tale to tell. The 44,097 enumerated in ISSo showed a diminution as compared with 1576, and 1576, a diminution upon previous enumerations, and there are not now probably one-tenth of the natives in New Zealand that there were in 1840 when the treaty of W.utangi was signed. In Australia the native element is, and always has been, moie numerous in the northern than in the southern parts ; and in Queensland, in the Northern Territoiy of South Australia, and in the north-west, there exists nineteen- twen ticths of the Australian aboriginals at the present time. Where the white man has not settled, there he is to be still found ; but just as soon as the European seed is ready to bo cast into the feiound, the native plant withers up, and if over the north ren part of the Australian continent there are still a couple of hundred thousand natives, we may be certain they are doomed equally with those elsewhere. As they at present exist, the numbers may be estimated to be about as follows :—: — j Enumerated. Unenumeratod. Victoria 780 — New South Wales 1,043 — Queensland . 20,585 40,000 B.mth Australia . 0,3 10 00,000 Western Australia 2,340 100,000 Total ... 31,700 200,000 Now Zealand . . 44,079 Tasmania . . — Grand Total 73,797 200,000 The history of our dealings with the native races iv Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, or in Canada or South Africa for that matter, has not at all points been an unsullied page. In many instances, the only argument that the settlers have thought the natives could be made to understand was the argument of fear, and reprisals have been often of a wholesale character. These have not ceased in the Pacific; even yet, and the usual penalty inflicted on the Pacific islanders for the murder of a white is the destruction of a village or two by one of Her Majesty's gunboats. Then again j the native cannot withstand the vices of j the European, drink and disease hastening his extermination, and the probability is that as in Australia, so in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, the influx of the European will mean the gradual extinction of the native. The very fact, too, of stopping their intertribal warfare renders them inert, and this again weakens their vitality.