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, with the Sanction and Support of the Government: Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and the State of Their Relations with Europeans — Volume 02Eyre, Edward John
History
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, with the Sanction and Support of the Government: Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and the State of Their Relations with Europeans — Volume 02
Eyre, Edward John
Australia -- Discovery and exploration; Ethnology -- Australia
The money usually voted by the councils of Government, towards defraying
expenses incurred on behalf of the Aborigines of Australia, is but a very
small per centage upon the sums that have been received for the sales of
lands, and is principally expended in defraying the salaries of
protectors, in supporting schools, providing food or clothing for one or
two head stations, and perhaps supplying a few blankets once in the year
to some of the outstations. Little is expended in the daily provisioning
of the natives generally, and especially in the more distant country
districts least populated by Europeans, but most densely occupied by
natives, and where the very thinness of the European inhabitants
precludes the Aborigines from resorting to the same sources to supply
their wants, that are open to them in a town, or more thickly inhabited
district. Such are those afforded by the charity of individuals, by the
rewards received for performing trifling services of work, by the
obtaining vast quantities of offal, or of broken victuals, which are
always abundant in a country where animal food is used in excess, and
where the heat of the climate daily renders much of it unfit for
consumption in the family, and by others of a similar nature.
Such resources, however humiliating and pernicious they are in their
effects, are not open to the tribes living in a district almost
exclusively occupied by the sheep or cattle of the settler, and where the
very numbers of the stock only more completely drive away the original
game upon which the native had been accustomed to subsist, and hold out a
greater temptation to him to supply his wants from the superabundance
which he sees around him, belonging to those by whom he has been
dispossessed. The following appropriate remarks are an extract from
Report of Aborigines' Protection Society, of March, 1841, (published in
the South Australian Register, 4th December, 1841.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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