THE ABORIGINES AND THEIR TREATMENT 217 



estimate of the number of the aborigines in the Port Phillip 

 district at the time of its first settlement. The accounts of Tuckey 

 and Knopwood, and indeed of all those connected with the settle- 

 ment of 1803, undoubtedly err on the side of exaggeration. The 

 statements of the absconder Buckley, who had exceptional oppor- 

 tunities of throwing light on this point, are quite unreliable, and 

 neither Hume and Hovell nor Sir Thomas Mitchell encountered 

 any large parties in the course of their wide explorations. It is 

 true that Captain Sturt in his famous voyage down the Murray 

 often fell in with them in considerable numbers, but by far the 

 larger portion of these were within the territory of New South 

 Wales or South Australia. The men who were probably best able 

 to offer an opinion on the subject were the official Protectors of the 

 aborigines, appointed by the British Government in 1837, and two 

 of these, Messrs. William Thomas and E. S. Parker, have left on 

 record the result of their calculations. The former estimates the 

 number of natives within the Port Phillip district in 1836 at 6,000, 

 the latter at 7,500. Other estimates range from that of Mr. Brough 

 Smyth at 3,000 to that of Mr. E. M. Curr at 11,000. An examina- 

 tion of the grounds on which these estimates are based, revised 

 in the light of later returns, leads to the belief that the figures 

 furnished by the Assistant Protectors approximate most nearly to 

 the truth, and that a mean, taken at 6,500, may be accepted as 

 fairly accurate. Of this total, probably about one-third was to be 

 found in the western district between the Colac Lakes and the 

 Glenelg River. At the time of Sir Richard Bourke's visit it was 

 estimated that there were about 700 natives within a radius of 

 thirty miles round Melbourne in the Counties of Bourke, Grant and 

 Mornington. Very little was then known of Gipps Land, but so 

 large a portion of that province was dense forest, a class of country 

 generally avoided by the superstitious natives, that the low esti- 

 mate of 1,000 for such an extensive area was probably approximately 

 correct. 



Fourteen years later, when the separation from New South 

 Wales was effected in 1851, an official census gave the number then 

 existing at 2,693. Ten years later it had fallen to 1,694. In 1881 

 the number had been reduced to 780 ; and the census of 1891 dis- 



