CHAPTER XVI 



THE ABORIGINES 



THE rapid dwindling of the aboriginal races of 

 Australia, since the coming of the white 

 man, is one of the least attractive incidents in 

 the development of the continent. The Tas- 

 manian blacks are already extinct, and of the 

 scattered tribes of Victoria, only a few hundred 

 members now remain. There were more than 

 six thousand full-blooded blacks in New South 

 Wales in 1882, and twenty years later, the num- 

 ber had shrunk to less than three thousand. Mr. 

 Archibald Meston, Protector of Aborigines in 

 Southern Queensland, estimates that the number 

 of blacks in that state was two hundred thousand 

 in the year 1840, and these, according to the 

 same authority, had been reduced to twenty-five 

 thousand at the end of the century. In spite of 

 the most stringent laws passed for the protection 

 of this remnant, they annually decrease by at 

 least five hundred, and it is therefore the opinion 

 of the authority I have quoted that the race will 

 be practically extinct in Queensland by the 

 middle of the present century. In Central and 

 195 



