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
"Under that system it is obvious to every coloured man, even the least
intelligent, that the extending settlements of the Europeans involve a
sentence of banishment, and eventual extermination, upon his tribe and
race. Major Mitchell, in his travels, refers to this apprehension on the
part of the Aborigines--"White man come, Kangaroo go away"--from which as
an inevitable consequence follows--"black man famished away." If, then,
this appears a necessary result of the unjust, barbarous, unchristian
mode of colonization pursued in New Holland, over-looking the other
incidental, and more pointedly aggravating provocations, to the coloured
man, associated with that system, how natural, in his case, is an enmity
which occasionally visits some of the usurping race with death! We call
the offence in him MURDER; but let the occasion be only examined, and we
must discover that, in so designating it, we are imposing geographical,
or national restrictions, upon the virtue of patriotism; or that in the
mani-festations of that principle, we make no allowances for the
influence on its features of the relative degradation or elevation of
those among whom it is met.
"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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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