Chapter 21 - Page 2

almost convinced him that it was as extraordinary
an instrument as the boomerang.

There must have been a large distribution of acuteness among those naked
skinny aboriginals, or they couldn't have been such unapproachable
trackers and boomerangers and weet-weeters. It must have been
race-aversion that put upon them a good deal of the low-rate intellectual
reputation which they bear and have borne this long time in the world's
estimate of them.

They were lazy--always lazy. Perhaps that was their trouble. It is a
killing defect. Surely they could have invented and built a competent
house, but they didn't. And they could have invented and developed the
agricultural arts, but they didn't. They went naked and houseless, and
lived on fish and grubs and worms and wild fruits, and were just plain
savages, for all their smartness.

With a country as big as the United States to live and multiply in, and
with no epidemic diseases among them till the white man came with those
and his other appliances of civilization, it is quite probable that there
was never a day in his history when he could muster 100,000 of his race
in all Australia. He diligently and deliberately kept population down by
infanticide--largely; but mainly by certain other methods. He did not
need to practise these artificialities any more after the white man came.
The white man knew ways of keeping down population which were worth
several of his. The white man knew ways of reducing a native population
80 percent. in 20 years. The native had never seen anything as fine as
that before.

For example, there is the case of the country now called Victoria--a
country eighty times as large as Rhode Island, as I have already said.
By the best official guess there were 4,500 aboriginals in it when the
whites came along in the middle of the 'Thirties. Of these, 1,000 lived
in Gippsland, a patch of territory the size of fifteen or sixteen Rhode
Islands: they did not diminish as fast as some of the other communities;
indeed, at the end of forty years there were still 200 of them left. The
Geelong tribe diminished more satisfactorily: from 173 persons it faded
to 34 in twenty years; at the end of another twenty the tribe numbered
one person altogether. The two Melbourne tribes could muster almost 300
when the white man came; they could muster but twenty, thirty-seven years
later, in 1875. In that year there were still odds and ends of tribes
scattered about the colony of Victoria, but I was told that natives of
full blood are very scarce now. It is said that the aboriginals continue
in some force in the huge territory called Queensland.

The early whites were not used to savages. They could not understand the
primary law of savage life: that if