Page:The aborigines of Australia.djvu/163

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The Aborigines of Australia.

described with a most painful certainty, which puts the Europeans completely "out of court" in respect of their treatment of the aborigines at the period in question. Why, the destruction of all the pastoral wealth of the entire colony would not afford sufficient justification for the unparalleled, the unnatural act of inhumanity detailed above by a Christian witness on his oath! The histories of conquests and of warfares—the wars of sects and the wars of races—furnish instances of atrocity and of cruelty in abundance; but it would be very difficult indeed to find any deed in the history of warfare surpassing in atrocity the Myall Creek massacre. "I heard the crying of the blacks for relief or assistance; they were moaning the same as a mother and children would cry; there were small things that could not walk. . . . There was an old man named Daddy, the oldest of the lot; he was an old, big, tall man; this Daddy, and another old man named Joey, they never tied along with the rest; they were crying and did not want to go; they made no resistance. . . . The small ones, two or three, were not able to walk; the women carried them on their backs in opossum skins." Such are a few of the expressions occurring throughout this dismal detail, which suggest the frightful nature of the entire transaction, and the fiendish spirit of the times. Again, "I saw smoke in the same direction they went." That smoke contained the "voice of a brother's blood, which cried to heaven from the earth," and it is a glorious consolation to know that even