I Know That
This Practice Of Returning Laden With Native Spoil Is More Frequently The
Result Of Thoughtlessness Or Curiosity Than Anything Else.
The implements
appear so trumpery, that the European thinks they can be of little use to
anybody, but the bad blood thus engendered between the aborigines and the
settlers is greater than would be easily credited.
Another reason, I would
venture to submit, in opposition to this custom is, that in the case of the
blacks doing any mischief, no method of punishing them can possibly be
devised equal in severity to the destruction of their weapons. A tribe is
rendered more helpless and more innocuous by this than by shooting down
half the males, and I am sure that if they once found that only in case of
mischief was this punishment resorted to, we should hear infinitely less of
cattle-spearing and shepherd-murdering than at present obtains. I mention
this, not from any good-will towards the blacks, who have been causes of
much sorrow to me and mine, but because I am sure that a discontinuance of
this idle habit would tend to lessen the existing causes of friction
between the two races.
In one of the camps we found a blanket - not, O reader, made of the finest
wool, deftly woven at the looms of Witney, but a blanket of Dame Nature's
own contrivance, stripped by the aboriginal from the bark of the Australian
tea-tree ('Melaleuca squarrosa'), no small shrub, but a noble fellow
standing from 150 to 200 feet high, and generally found in the
neighbourhood of fresh water, or in the beds of creeks.
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