SHOCKING TREATMENT OF BLACKS IN QUEENSLAND.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2540, 20 October 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

SHOCKING TREATMENT OF BLACKS IN QUEENSLAND.

The Brisbane Courier is not a papor inclined to sensational exaggeration, but if the statements respecting the treatment of the aborigines in the far north, which it reproduces in its columns with an apparent belief in their possibility, be true, a heavy responsibility will rest upou the Queensland Government. It has long been a matter of notoriety that the settlers in those remote regions have little regard for human life where only a wild blackfellow is concerned. The blacks are regarded rather in the light of a nuisance to be exterminated than as human beings with rights of their own. We have no wish to take the view of tho extreme sentimentalist, and to deny to those who do tho rough and dangerous work of pioneering the power of defending their lives and their property if these are put in peril. But experience has given proof enough in this and in other countries to show that life removed from the restraints of civilisation is apt to develop a very harsh estimate of the privileges of the stranger in dealing with an inferior race. According- to a correspondent, described by the Courier as a well known pressman, inured to the rougher side of exploration and " not particularly prejudiced in favour of the natives or very soft hearted," atrocities are of frequent occurrence in the northern districts of Queensland too horrible to bear explanation. He accuses the " grass dukes " by whom wo suppose he means the squatters and their subordinates, of "murdering, abducting children for immoral purposes and stockwhipping defenceless girls." Tho Northern Miner, a paper published in tho district to which reference is made, but which has strougly partisan proclivities, eudorses all these statements of atrocities, and refers to squatters branding blacks and keeping harems of black gins. The system of keeping black troppers to hunt down the blacks has long been condemned as open to terrible abuse. A " dispersion" is simply a euphemistic wpy of describing a wholesale massacre, perpetrated perhaps for no better cause than the killing of a. sheep or a bullock by starving natives driven off their own hunting grounds. A story is told in detail of the extermination of a camp simply because some blacks had been seen passing a mining station where nothing had been stolen for months. We would fain hope that there is exaggeration in these statements, and that isolated and rare examples have been multiplied into a general system. But a deep stain will rest on the fair fame of Queensland if these charges are not fully investigated aud some measures taken to prevent the cruel and merciless extermination of the natives.—Leader.