120 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



success of the Queensland pioneers may be ascribed 

 chiefly to the interest they took in their work. So, at 

 least, affirms an unusually competent judge.* They 

 were armed in high measure with the passive virtues 

 not uncommon in savage races. They cheerfully bore 

 suffering and privation. They were hilarious around 

 their camp-fire, and constant corroborees afforded an 

 outlet for their sociability. 



The relations between whites and blacks in the more 

 unsettled districts were often hostile, but where the 

 whites were just and humane, a beautiful harmony not 

 seldom prevailed. In the late thirties, Mr. Bartley 

 relates, two squatters in the district of Armidale by 

 the kindness they showed induced a small tribe of 

 blacks to remain almost constantly near their station, 

 employing the young men as stockmen, shepherds, 

 and domestic servants. In Queensland, says IVIrs. 

 Praed, recalling her childhood (and the writer has been 

 furnished with similar evidence about the interior of 

 New South Wales), they were nurses to the children, 

 and carried them on their backs across creeks, or when 

 they climbed trees in search of opossums ; Mrs. Camp- 

 bell Praed, when she was a little girl, was taken by them 

 to a corroboree. The children went to (not into) 

 the gunyahs and played with the blacks. Young Rose 

 Murray Prior loved a half-caste boy, and Ringo taught 

 her to find grubs, iguanas, and the eggs of the black 

 snake. At the camps of the blacks she learnt to plait 

 dilly-bags, chop hives out of trees, and make drinking- 

 cups out of gourds.f 



The state of things that prevailed in the southern 

 colonies in the thirties, forties, and fifties, and in 

 Northern Queensland in the fifties and sixties, is still 

 to be found in the Northern Territoiy and the North- 

 West. The stations from the Gascoyne River right 

 through the country and round the coast to Port Darwin , 

 says a well-informed writer, " are practically run by 



* Grant, Bush Life in Queensland, ii. 155-61. 



I Campbell Pbaed, My Australian Girlhood, pp. 64-8. 



