ABSTRACT OP PROCEEDINGS. XXV11. 



of fifteen hundred natives. Including the country for 

 twenty-five miles inland, a later authority considered that 

 there would be about three thousand people there. No 

 accurate enumeration of the blacks was made until recent 

 years. The Secretary of the Board for Protection of the 

 Aborigines, Mr. A. O. Pettit, has kindly supplied me with 

 the following figures and with a map showing the present 

 distribution of aboriginals of New South Wales, as located 

 by the Census of 12th May, 1920. 



In 1882 there were 6540 full-blooded natives in N.S. Wales 

 1892 „ 4458 



1902 „ 2880 



1912 „ 1917 



1921 „ 1281 



The native people were not destroyed by war, famiue, 

 pestilence or any violence ; they simply withered away 

 slowly under the blight of European contact. 



Judge Barron Field wrote a paper on the aborigines for 

 the Philosophical Society, but did not appreciate that the 

 ragged and despised blackfellow at his kitchen door was a 

 treasury of ethnological information. If he had, he could 

 have given aid to science and might have set a fruitful 

 example, but he gleaned his matter from books and travellers 

 and so produced a trashy and pedantic memoir. Here, as 

 in America, the French travellers took more interest in the 

 natives and wrote better descriptions of them than our own 

 people did. Indeed it was the lowest, most illiterate and 

 vicious of the white residents that knew most about the 

 blacks. And the blacks knew far more of the language, 

 social system and religion of the Europeans than the 

 educated whites knew of theirs. During the century that 

 has elapsed since Barron Field wrote, ethnological study 

 in this State has been generally neglected. What is known 

 of the native race is due chiefly to investigators in Victoria, 

 South Australia and Queensland. 



