126 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



another source of trouble. They had hitherto lived 

 on the few mammals, nearly all marsupials, that were 

 natives of the country, and the few A^dngless birds ; 

 but when they came to know the flavour of beef and 

 mutton, they keenly rehshed them. They therefore 

 stole sheep and cattle for food. Yet all observers state 

 that those they killed for food were few to the numbers 

 they killed in revenge. 



As the pioneer flits from place to place, driven north- 

 ward, westward, and north-westward by the pressure 

 of population, precisely the same phenomena haunt his 

 steps. In the desert, on his way to the Northern 

 Territory, the overlander may come upon a lonely 

 grave, and, close by the remains of an old gunyah, 

 find another — the graves of victims of the blacks. 

 Elsewhere another opened grave is found under an iron- 

 wood tree, on the bark of which may be read the 

 words, rudely cut : " Travis — speared b}'^ the blacks," 

 with the date of his death. The blacks had dug up 

 and scattered the bones, and tried to obliterate the 

 inscription.* 



In the new country — the western side of the Northern 

 Territory and the Kimberley district of Western Aus- 

 tralia — the blacks continue the troubles they have 

 created everywhere else that the white man follows 

 them. They still do great damage among the cattle, 

 still more by those they scare than by those they kill. 

 The chroniclers of to-day tell the same tale as the his- 

 torians of a past generation — that cattle are easily 

 frightened or maddened by the scent of the blacks, and, 

 when they have been once scared, they groAV wild and 

 unmanageable. Yet the number of cattle destroyed 

 by the blacks in the Kimberley district alone is very 

 great : it is estimated at 4,000 head a year. There are 

 always, we are told, from 40 to 100 cattle-spearing 

 blacks in the gaols of Wyndham and Derby, f and there, 



* Mbs. Dominic D. Daly, Northern Territory, pp. 332, 334, 

 337. 



t Sydney Herald, April 30, 1910. 



