THE ABOKIGINES AND THEIR TREATMENT 237 



and professed absolute inability to offer any suggestion as to the 

 cause of such wanton brutality. Subsequent events proved these 

 statements to be a conspiracy of falsehood, Mr. Osprey afterwards 

 declaring that his excuse for thus lying was the threat held out to 

 Him by the murderers, who had really started from his own hut, 

 that they would shoot any person who dared to inform upon them. 

 It was while the villains who perpetrated this cowardly butchery 

 were undiscovered that the settlers of the district addressed Mr. 

 Latrobe, urging further police protection against the increasing hos- 

 tilities of the natives. In his reply the Superintendent promised to 

 do what was practicable in that direction, and said that while the 

 destruction of their property by savages, if unprovoked and un- 

 revenged, certainly demanded sympathetic consideration, he yet had 

 another side of the picture to present. He wrote : " The feeling of 

 abhorrence, which one act of savage retaliation or cruelty on your 

 part will rouse, must weaken if not altogether obliterate every other 

 in the minds of most men, and I regret to state that I have before 

 me a statement, in a form which I dare not discredit, showing that 

 such acts are perpetrated among you. It reveals a night attack 

 upon a small number of natives by a party of the white inhabitants 

 of your district, and the murder of no fewer than three defenceless 

 aboriginal women and a child in their sleeping place ; and this at the 

 very time your memorial was in the act of signature, and in the 

 immediate vicinity of the station of two of the parties who have 

 signed it" 



In conclusion, he makes an earnest appeal to them to come for- 

 ward and aid the authorities in clearing the obscurity from this 

 horrid deed, and to purge themselves and their servants from sus- 

 picion by ceaseless activity until the murderers are discovered and 

 the district relieved from the stain of harbouring them within its 

 boundaries. Though the real facts were known to many, and cer- 

 tainly to two of the recipients of Mr. Latrobe's letter, they made no 

 sign. But a coarser form of appeal, in the shape of a reward of 

 100, with a free pardon and a passage to England if the informant 

 was a convict, tardily brought one of the ruffians to offer himself as 

 Queen's evidence. Eighteen months after the murders, the manager 

 of the station and two subordinates were brought to trial for the 



