THE ABORIGINES AND THEIR TREATMENT 215 



colonists, who by frequent contact had become interested in the race 

 they were superseding, have published volumes containing much 

 valuable and detailed information. Notably Mr. Alfred W. Howitt, 

 long resident as a police magistrate and warden in Eastern Gipps 

 Land, and Mr. James Dawson, a very early settler in the Port Fairy 

 district, have done good service in this direction. The latter, who 

 had for nearly half a century exceptional opportunities of intimate 

 acquaintance with the tribes in the western districts, and appears 

 to have possessed their absolute confidence, is most emphatic in 

 bearing testimony to their intelligence and to their unswerving 

 loyalty to those traditional laws and obligations which, while of 

 course differing fundamentally from our code of morals, take a 

 corresponding place in the tribal organisation and its social economy. 

 In the preface to his book, published in Melbourne in 1881, he 

 says : 



" In recording my admiration of the general character of the 

 aborigines, no attempt is made to palliate what may appear to us to 

 be objectionable customs common to savages in nearly every part 

 of the globe ; but it may be truly said of them that, with the excep- 

 tion of the low estimate they naturally place on life, their moral 

 character and modesty, all things considered, compare favourably 

 with those of the most highly cultivated communities of Europe. 

 People seeing only the miserable remnants to be met with about 

 the white man's grog-shop may be inclined to doubt this, but if 

 these doubters were to be brought into close communication with 

 the aborigines, away from the means of intoxication, and were to 

 listen to their guileless conversation, their humour and wit, and their 

 expressions of honour and affection for one another, those who are 

 disposed to look upon them as scarcely human would be compelled 

 to admit that in general intelligence, common-sense, integrity and 

 the absence of anything repulsive in their conduct, they are at least 

 equal if not superior to the general run of white men." 



These are not the opinions of undisciplined enthusiasm, for Mr. 

 Dawson was over seventy years of age when he published his book, 

 and he had spent some forty years in close observation. He had 

 taken up his station in a district where the natives were reported 

 to be exceptionally aggressive, and more than ordinarily numerous. 



