122 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



hideous, v/hen the passions of the whites were roused 

 to fury, a war of retahation, fierce and deadly, would 

 be entered upon, and might last for months. Stockmen 

 and trusted blackboys would be armed, and a foray 

 made. The far-famed and ill-famed black pohce might 

 be summoned. The fighting blacks would almost all 

 get killed, and the rest of the tribe be driven further 

 northwards. But the lesson would be only too well 

 learned. A spirit of distrust would grow up on both 

 sides. Refined women would learn to shoot with the 

 revolver and become deadly shots.* 



Nevertheless, these same women were not blind to 

 the blood-guiltiness of the whites. " We should have 

 had no murders," said one of them, " had we con- 

 sistently appealed to the generosity of the blacks." 

 After telling the story of the Myall Creek murders, when 

 Attorney-General Plunkett was determined to procure 

 the conviction of the leaders, Mrs. Praed adds : " Had 

 there been more like Plunkett, the national conscience 

 would have had less cause for self-reproach." f It was 

 terror or a desire for revenge that drove the blacks to 

 commit their worst atrocities. The abuse of fire-arms 

 by convict servants was a frequent source of strife. 

 Countless hundreds of blacks, a pohce magistrate 

 testified, had been slaughtered away in the back country, 

 where high-handed wrong-doers were equally free from 

 protection, as they complained, and secure against 

 detection, as they felt, if they did not boast of it. J 

 All the histories and most contemporary narratives 

 abound in such tales. The case of the Myall Creek 

 murders is almost classic, but it needs to be told again 

 because, unhappily, it is typical of this class of crimes, 

 if it is far from being typical of the punishment meted 

 out to them. 



In 1838 some 40 or 50 migratory natives, more than 

 half of them women and children, were temporarily 



* Praed, op. cit., pp. 74, 100. 



t Op. cit., p. 17. 



j RusDEN, History of Australia, ii. 



