1 68 AUSTRALIAN PICTURES. 



or responsibility, very much as children, and they have the cleverness and 

 the uncertain tempers and the mercurial happiness of children. They could 

 live, it must be remembered, with a minimum of exertion. So long as a 

 country was not over-populated, opossums, fish and roots were obtained with 

 little labour, and there was no occasion for house-building. As animals like 

 the sheep and the horse flourish in the open in most parts of Australia 

 without artificial shelter, so man can ' camp out ' with comparative ease. Thus 

 the black was not, and is not, called upon to exercise his higher faculties. 

 Food was too scarce to enable him to multiply and to form permanent 

 settlements. Yet, such as it was, its collection did not brace him up to any 

 mighty efforts. His life was never in danger from wild animals. If he found 

 many opossums, he indulged in a surfeit ; if marsupials, lizards, birds and roots 

 were scarce, he pinched for a time. If the black had discovered agriculture, 

 his state might have been very different, but of cultivation he never had the 

 slightest idea. Once when a tribe was induced by an enthusiastic settler to 

 plant potatoes, the men and women rose in the night and dug up the seed 

 and feasted upon it. It was inconceivable to them why the white man should 

 desire to bury good food. 



Thus the black man wandered in one sense aimlessly over vast tracts 

 of country, living on its chance fruits : a restless nomad, with no apparent 

 prospect of rising on the social scale. Even in Victoria, the garden of 

 Australia, it took 18,000 acres to maintain a black. It must be admitted 

 that this waste of power was too great. The European had a right to 

 conceive that the land was not in an occupation that need be respected, 

 though more consideration for the original tenants might have been and 

 ought to have been shown. The mischief was that colonisation was 

 unsystematic. No one knew how to deal with the blacks. The blacks did 

 not know how to establish friendly relations with the white man. 



We give two illustrations here of Victorian natives. The likeness in 

 profile is that of a civilised black, and is strongly characteristic of the 

 Victorian race. The woman is also a good representative of the Victorian 

 lubra. In civilised races the woman eclipses the man in beauty, but the rule 

 reads backwards in savage races. The Australian black man is often stately 

 and picturesque — -his mate is generally hideous. 



An offence committed within a tribe was generally settled by the 

 disputants fighting the issue out with spears or with waddies until the elders 

 thought that justice was satisfied. Terrible wounds would be given and 

 received, but to the healthy black man, cuts, smashes, and bruises that would 

 be fatal to the white are as nothing. 



Although many pioneer settlers lived on friendly terms with the blacks, 

 yet their sheep would be stolen, and then there were reprisals. Here and 

 there all the hands on a station would be sacrificed. When the settlers 

 were at all near each other, it was the custom in Victoria to fix heavy bells 



