It is a good many years since I was at Coranderrk, as the settlement is named, and therefore I have no very clear memories of it, excepting that the people all seemed exceedingly leisurely and good tempered, and childishly clamorous for pennies. Two or three men emulated each other in throwing the boomerang for our amusement, and in this the older men were certainly by far the best, literally bursting with pride at their achievements; one grey-haired man, taller and bigger-built than his fellows, sending it to such a height and distance that it had dwindled to a hardly distinguishable speck against the blue sky before it turned and came whistling back, in a sweeping semicircle, to drop almost exactly at the place where its owner stood. The little huts at Coranderrk are tidy and comfortable, and the people well fed and cared for; but there is something inexpressibly sad about the whole encampment. It is bad enough to see one person dying—say of consumption, or some such fatal disease—but it is worse by far to see a whole people die, no matter how ineffectual they may be in their powers of grappling with the conditions of modern life, for those individuals who are not actually dead are yet in a state of senile decay, and, having lost the wonderful instincts of a savage, are still groping wistfully and ignorantly among the intricate ways of civilization. Still, sometimes if you can borrow a black fellow, to go fishing or trapping with, you may yet catch sight of a spark of the old bushman’s cunning and mysterious lore. Altogether there are in Victoria seven mission-stations and depôts for aborigines, the number they house being in all only a little over 260. Besides this, there are still a few wandering black fellows, who are given food and clothing when they call at the mission-stations, but they are very few in number, many of them being but half-castes, the total number of the pure-blooded blacks, in 1901, being estimated at only 271, with 381 of mixed blood. {298} Once, when I was staying up in New South Wales, a little old black fellow, apparently a most genial person, was pointed out to me, who had married a white woman. After a while she had grown tired of the union and forsaken her Othello, on which he brought her back, with the aid of a club, and, finding her still restless, broke one of her legs. Directly the bone had set she ran—or rather hobbled, with the help of a stick—away again; on which he brought her back once more, and broke both her legs, to make sure of her. After this—or so I was told—they remained a most happy and peaceable couple, while, though she was still lame, she was quite sufficiently recovered to limp about the _mia-mia_ and attend adequately to her lord’s wants, which, after all, were not much more numerous than those of old Omar—less, indeed, by the book of verse, for which might be substituted a pipe. Who can say now that, tactfully managed, mixed marriages are not a success?