Our fields and forests, which once furnished us with abundance
of vegetable and animal food, now yield us no more; they and their produce
are yours; you prosper on our native soil, and we are famishing."
- STRZELECKI'S N. S. WALES, p. 356.]
In addition to the many other inconsistencies in our conduct towards the
Aborigines, not the least extraordinary is that of placing them, on the
plea of protection, under the influence of our laws, and of making them
British subjects. Strange anomaly, which by the former makes amenable to
penalties they are ignorant of, for crimes which they do not consider as
such, or which they may even have been driven to commit by our own
injustice; and by the latter but mocks them with an empty sound, since
the very laws under which we profess to place them, by their nature and
construction are inoperative in affording redress to the injured.
[Note 46: "To subject savage tribes to the penalties of laws with which
they are unacquainted, for offences which they, very possibly, regard as
acts of justifiable retaliation for invaded rights, is a proceeding
indefensible, except under circumstances of urgent and extreme
necessity." - Fourth Report of the Colonization Commissioners, presented to
the House of Commons, 29th July, 1840.
"The late act, declaring them naturalized as British subjects, has only
rendered them legally amenable to the English criminal law, and added one
more anomaly to all the other enactments affecting them.
