Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, Volume 2Grey, George
History
Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, Volume 2
Grey, George
Natural history -- Australia -- Western Australia; Western Australia -- Discovery and exploration
22. Imagining that a native child is perfectly capable of being
civilised, let it also be granted that, from proper preventive measures
having been adopted, this child has nothing to fear from the vengeance of
the other natives, so that it stands in these respects nearly or
altogether in the position of a European.
23. If this native child is a boy who is to pay the individual who
undertakes to teach him some calling the fee usually given with an
apprentice; who will indemnify this person for the time he spends in
instructing the boy before he can derive any benefit from his labour, or
for the risk he incurs of the boy's services being bestowed elsewhere as
soon as they are worth having?
24. Until this difficulty is got over it appears evident that the natives
will only be employed in herding cattle, or in the lowest order of manual
labour which requires no skill, and for which the reward they receive
will be so small as scarcely to offer an inducement to them to quit their
present wandering mode of life.
25. The remedy I would suggest for this evil would have another advantage
besides a tendency to ameliorate it, for it would give the settlers a
great and direct interest in the aborigines without entailing any expense
upon the Government. It is founded on the following fact:
26. The Government, in order to create a supply of labour in the
colonies, have been in the habit of giving certain rewards to those
individuals who introduced labourers into them. Now it would appear that
he who reclaims one of the aborigines not only adds another labourer to
those who are already in the colony, but further confers such a benefit
on his fellow-settlers by rendering one who was before a useless and
dangerous being a serviceable member of the community, that this
circumstance alone entitles him to a reward.
27. I would therefore propose that, on the production of the
hereafter-named documents, a settler should receive a certificate
entitling him to a certain sum, which should either be allowed to reckon
towards the completion of location duties, or else as a remission
certificate in the purchase of land, or, in lieu of this, a grant of
land; and that this sum or grant should be regulated according to a table
specifying the various circumstances that are likely to occur, and drawn
up by the local government of each place where such regulation should be
introduced.
28. The documents to which I allude are these:
1. A deposition before the nearest magistrate to such settler's house
that a native or natives have been resident with him constantly for the
last six months, and have been employed in stated species of labour.
2. A certificate from the government resident of the district that, to
the best of his belief, such statement is true, for that, on his visiting
this settler's house, the stated number of natives were there, and were
respectively occupied in the kinds of labour described.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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