252 THE ABOBIGINES OP AUSTRALIA. 



notes accordingly refer to a people who are fast disappearing from 

 the earth. Imperfect as they are, they may possess some value from 

 the fact that they are in no degree derived from books, but embody 

 the results of personal observations of the natives of Australia, con- 

 cerning whom few among the numerous writers on the great south- 

 ern region of British colonization appear to feel the slighest interest, 

 or to have thought their habits and characteristics worthy of 

 remark. 



It was my fortune to pass the greater part of my boyhood at 

 King George's Sound, a settlement on the western coast of Australia. 

 There the Aborigines were my companions and playfellows, and thus 

 the following account embodies facts which came under my own 

 observation, or were related to me by the natives themselves. It nar- 

 rates principally the result of my observations on those with whom 

 I sojourned ; but it may be added that the manners and customs of 

 the Aborigines of the western, southern, and eastern coasts of Aus- 

 tralia vary so little that a description of one may answer for all. Of 

 those inhabiting the northern coast I could speak only from report. 

 They are a still more savage race, with whom little intercourse has 

 hitherto been held, and they appear to present a striking contrast in 

 some respects to the natives of other regions of the Australian 

 Continent. 



Referring as I do to a people rapidly becoming extinct, it will not 

 detract from any value these notes may possess, that they do not 

 embody a description of Australia of the present time, with its won- 

 derful gold fields, and its vast and multifarious population gathered 

 seemingly from nearly every country of the known world; but they 

 refer to Australia as it was twenty years since, when Melbourne and 

 Port Philip were inhabited only by the savage, when South Austra- 

 lia, as a Colony, was unknown, and Western Australia was only be- 

 ginning to be settled by the white man. 



The entrance to the noble basin of Princess E-oyal Harbour, on 

 which the town of Albany in AVestern Australia stands, is formed 

 by two high and rocky hills about half a mile apart, and here, some 

 twenty years since, on a bright morning in the month of May (which 

 be it remembered is the depth of an Australian winter,) I obtained 

 my first sight of the Aborigines of the Southern Continent. The 

 first impression produced by a sight of the grinning native in the 

 bow of the harbour master's boat — black as coal, but with a pair of 

 keen sparkling eyes, and a row of teeth disproportionately prominent 

 from the large size of his gaping mouth, — was that we were looking 

 0& a baboon or some strange creature of that new world, rather 





