Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central Australia And Overland From Adelaide To King George's Sound In The Years 1840-1: Sent By The Colonists Of South Australia By Eyre, Edward John
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"Our Present Colonization System Renders The Native And The Colonizing
Races From Necessity Belligerents; And There Can Be No Real Peace, No
Real Amity, No Mutual Security, So Long As That System Is Not Substituted
By One Reconciling The Interest Of Both Races.
Colonists will fall before
the spears and the waddies of incensed Aborigines, and they in return
will be made the victims of 'summary justice.'
"In cases of executive difficulty, the force of popular prejudice will be
apt to be too strong for the best intentioned Governor to withstand it;
Europeans will have sustained injury; the strict forms of legal justice
may be found of difficult application to a race outcast or degraded,
although ORIGINALLY in a condition fitted to appreciate them, to benefit
by them, and reflect their benefits upon others; impatient at this
difficulty, the delay it may occasion, and the shelter from ultimate
punishment, the temptation will ever be strong to revert to summary
methods of proceeding; and thus, as in a circle, injustice will be found
to flow reciprocal injury, and from injury injustice again, in another
form. The source of all these evils, and of all this injustice, is the
unreserved appropriation of native lands, and the denial, in the first
instance of colonization, of equal civil rights. To the removal of those
evils, so far as they can be removed in the older settlements, to their
prevention in new colonies, the friends of the Aborigines are invoked to
direct their energy; to be pacified with the attainment of nothing less;
for nothing less will really suffice."
Can it be deemed surprising that a rude, uncivilized being, driven from
his home, deprived of all his ordinary means of subsistence [Note 45 at
end of para.], and pressed perhaps by a hostile tribe from behind, should
occasionally be guilty of aggressions or injuries towards his oppressors?
The wonder rather is, not that these things do sometimes occur, but that
they occur so rarely.
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