Page:The aborigines of Australia.djvu/177

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164
THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA.

of whom were full-grown men, while he described a native village which was met with at another place during the course of his travels as numbering seventy substantially-constructed huts, each of which was capable of accommodating fifteen persons; and in the entire progress of the expedition large tribes were continually met with. In the young colony of Western Australia, where colonization has yet made but comparatively small progress, all accounts tend to show that the aboriginal population is at the present day so numerous that they still divide the mastery of the country with the colonists. The most recent accounts, while they speak of the old settlements as the biding-places of large numbers of aborigines, set forth that there was considerable danger that many of the more remote stations and villages would have to be abandoned, in consequence of the hostility of the numerous tribes who inhabit the borders of the colony. Advancing to the north, the only information which we possess is that derived from the explorations of Leichhardt through the interior, and the surveys of Stokes and others on the coast. The former, in the journal of his first expedition, speaks of meeting with tribes of aboriginals almost throughout the entire course of his travels, and where the tribes themselves were not visible, traces of their wanderings, as the tracks of their camp-fires, the remains of their mia-mias, burying-places, utensils, and weapons were almost continually observable. Stokes, on the other hand,