230 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



Dredge must have misconstrued his agreement. The Governor's 

 own views were fairly summed up in the following passage : 



' ' Mr. Dredge says he was dissatisfied from the beginning ; the 

 Governor believes he was, and so also were the other Protectors ; 

 and this is one of the reasons perhaps why His Excellency from the 

 beginning has had so little reason to be satisfied with them or their 

 exertions. From the beginning he observed in them all, and even 

 in their chief, a disposition to complain a great deal, and to write a 

 great deal, but to bestir themselves in their proper avocations very 

 little. Instead of going to the aborigines the aborigines were 

 brought to them at Melbourne, where, as might easily have been 

 foreseen, they became the prey of new diseases and learned new 

 vices." 



Mr. William Le Souef was appointed to succeed Mr. Dredge in 

 the Goulburn Valley, and for a time the advent of a younger and 

 more energetic man seemed to promise some better results. But 

 there was no permanent improvement, for experience showed that 

 the Protectors were quite unable to control the natives in the in- 

 terests of peace, and when they temporarily gathered a few in, they 

 became such clamorous beggars as to frighten the officials who 

 tended them. Mr. Charles Griffith, who arrived in Port Phillip in 

 1840, and published his impressions of the settlement a few years 

 later, gives a vivid picture of the state of affairs at Mount Eouse. 

 He says the entire establishment of the protectorate consisted of six 

 white men, three of whom were convict servants : and as two of 

 these were constantly away carting stores, the remaining four were 

 continually at the mercy of several hundreds of unruly savages if it 

 had come to a rupture. The natives brought in sheep, stolen from 

 a neighbouring squatter, and ate them at the protectorate, and when 

 the overseer remonstrated with them they threatened to kill him. 

 Mr. Griffith goes on to say : 



" At the time of my first visit to the settlement in 1842 there 

 were three or four hundred natives encamped there, and the follow- 

 ing was the daily routine : In the morning they were put into a pen 

 and run out one by one as sheep are when they are counted, when 

 each received a mess of a kind of burgoo, or porridge, which he 

 carried away in a hollow piece of bark. In the middle of the day 



