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LIFE IN AUSTRALIA.

BY THE REV. J. B. OWEN, M.A., OF BILSTON.

CHAPTER III.

THE ABORIGINES:-THEIR MENDICITY AND INDOLENCE-NOT

TO BE TRUSTED INDISCRIMINATELY IGNORANCE OF THEIR
COUNTRY.-TREASURES.-SKETCH OF A NATIVE ENCAMP-
EXAMPLE.-OPPOSITE PICTURE OF NATIVE EVANGELIZATION.

MIST.-EVIL EFFECTS OF THE WHITE MAN'S DRINKING

-ACCOUNT OF A GOOD SQUATTER.

I ONCE thought that the importunity of a tho-
rough-bred Irish mendicant bore the palm in the
world of beggary; but poor, patched, penury-
stricken Paddy must yield the bad pre-eminence to
the Australian aborigines. They often linger about
groups
when the diggers are at their meals,
begging, in voluble cant English, at every mouthful
which our countrymen swallow. They will zea-
lously help them at meals, but refuse the slightest
co-operation with them at their work. They seem
too indolent to have ever washed themselves, if
only for the curiosity of the new sensation of clean-
liness. There is scarcely a bird or beast in Aus-
tralia which does not occupy as much time at its
toilet as the Australian human creatures.

which I stalked to and fro in solitary confinement, unable to escape even my own sensations. The long silence at times was so awful and magnetic that I realized a kind of coma that disabled me from any effort to break it, even by a whistle, lest the echo should only make the stillness more painfully obvious. Your echo in the bush is like nature rejecting your voice, and forcing you to eat your own words. Ah! what is that light yonder that greets my wistful gaze as the day is closing in, and the peremptory twilight of Australia shuts its dark door in the face of heaven as soon as the sun's back is turned? To the hungry, weary bushranger, the gleam of a hut-fire shines brightlier than a star in the cold far-off heavens, which you never think of getting nearer to, as you hope to do at yonder hearth. As I approach, I discover it is a group of aborigines squatted round a primitive fire of their forefathers, under the same miamia" as when their intercourse with Europeans commenced half a generation ago. These primogeni tive lords of the soil seem scarcely above par with the settlers' dogs. The neighbourship of civiliza"They look at us in the gulleys," said one man tion hitherto has done little for them, the zealous with whom I conversed, "as if they thought what labours of the missionary being frustrated by the blockheads we were to work so hard for these bits immoralities of his irreligious countrymen. The of yellow stuff." There was never a grain of gold, apathetic savage has naturally preferred the vicious nor precious stone, nor anything else bearing any affinities of the latter to the more arduous virtues value, found in the hands of a single native. "Aof the former, and learns to treat the man of God black woman, called a lubra, begged of me one with much the same indifference which he meets day," said my informant, "and first asked, in with from the white men of the world. broken English, Damper, damper.' I gave her a bit of damper. Bit meat, bit meat,' immediately followed as her next request. I gave her some. 'Bit tea, bit tea,' she next asked; and, determined to humour her, and ascertain the extent of her mendicant impudence, I gave her a screw of tea. 'Bit soogar, bit soogar.' Sugar was boon number four, and I gave her a little. She then opened a fresh account with, Bit damper, picaninny; that is, a bit for her child. 'Bit meat;' I gave it; but then I burst out laughing, and she saw through me, and timidly slunk away; but in ten minutes after, she sent her husband, who had stood sulkily and apathetically witnessing from a little distance her manoeuvres, and he began the same catechism, Bit damper,' and would no doubt have rehearsed every article, but that I reached my hand towards the cart-whip lying on the cask, when my sable petitioner shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and beat an ignominious retreat. We should be glad to feed, clothe, and pay them wages, or build them houses, if they would only do a day's work now and then, but they have not the sense of a kangaroo."

I reminded my friend how thankful we ought o be that we had been better reared and taught, and that their abject condition rather appealed to our pity than contempt. To convey some idea of the habits of the natives, I will here present our readers with a description of

AN ENCAMPMENT OF THE ABORIGINES.

I had been nearly three days on my trackless route, says a pilgrim of the bush, steering myself by my pocket compass as if I were a vessel at sea. I had only passed one station on the whole weary way. The sense of loneliness at times grew overpowering. I felt as if all nature were a prison in

What a mere mob of grotesque, disordered figures the rude light of the logwood gleams upon, half clad as they are, if clad at all, in the cast-off clothes of the colonists! Any one of these poor black chapmen would willingly exchange a skin worth a sovereign for an old hat not worth sixpence. Wandering on the maiden sward of his native bush, the abo riginal man, with his opossum rug thrown gracefully over his shoulder, like a primæval robe, moves in a wild unconscious dignity among the trees, like a natural lord of the manor; but, bedizened in the vulgar ragged slops of the squatters, he is reduced to the level of a vagabond. There is one armed cap-à-pié, the parenthesis of entire nakedness in his person relieved by a military hat on his head, and a pair of worn-out top-boots on his feet. Another minces about with an awkward imitation of some dandy settler, having on only a venerable blue dress coat, whose brass buttons are still bright and glittering, and its tails hanging down on the dark skin calf as naturally as over a pair of pantaloons. A third has packed his loins into a pair of plethoric unmentionables, which have cracked and peeled upon the wearer, like the bark of the native trees, and they have evidently occupied their position since the proud day of their first investiture. A fourth stalks to and fro in a loose dirty cotton night-shirt, as if he had been suddenly roused out of bed some months ago, and had never got back again to complete his toilet. A fifth wears merely a red plush waistcoat; while another, with equal economy, contents himself with a sergeant's uniform coat, gold stripes and all. In the midst of them rose about three fully-equipped bronze folk, in the brave accoutrements of the mounted police, from which corps they have probably absconded some months before, to appease among their squalid fellow-savages the fit of nos

talgia which sickened them with the settlements | dropped by its drunken mother on the embers, is of the white men. Excepting, perhaps, a dozen of them, wrapped, in cerecloth fashion, in the blankets annually presented to a limited number of the natives by the colonial governor, all the rest were entirely naked, save a bandage round their loins. One man, evidently a renegade European, by the ease with which he wore his garments, his skin of a gipsey hue almost emulating the duskier tinge of his associates, moved about from one to another part of the fire as the whim seized him, dispossessing at each turn some drowsy native of his lair, and mimicking the airs and annoyances of a more civilized jack-in-office. The black men growled, grinned, and grimly yielded to his vulgar despotism, but kept up a grunt of sullen reluctance for minutes afterwards.

There appeared to be about forty of these strange figures, counting them in my approach as well as the increasing darkness would permit me. All were smoking, even to the women, and some of the elder boys. If there be any zoological philosophy in the naturalist's classification of man as a cooking animal, the pretensions of the Australian savage are of the humblest order. Their lubras, or native wives, are seen, on our drawing near, to be engaged in smothering opossums, wild turkeys, and one or two kangaroos, amongst the hot ashes, without skinning or disembowelling the entrails of a single creature; and before they are half baked, their impatient lords snatch their respective meals from the burning embers with their bare hands, brush off the singed hair or feathers, as the case may be, with the other hand, and without further ceremony tear off a mouthful with their teeth, and then pass the mangled morsels to their lubras to take their bite in their turn. Receiving their share, thrown over their lords' shoulders, the ladies with equal nonchalance toss the creatures again into the fire, when the same process of mastication, precedence, and succession is repeated, until the bones are picked as clean as if a pack of hungry dogs had gnawed them.

drowned by a volley of native imprecations from the equally drunken father, who beats them both for the accident. Then a heavy savage rolls over insensibly upon an irritable little creature of the group, who fastens upon him with his teeth like a dog, and is immediately worried and bit off by his superincumbent antagonist, like another dog, and the two continue to exhibit their white teeth, and growl and snap at each other for minutes after. A dozen others, starting to their feet, with a mad shout of inarticulate revelry, grasp at each other's hands so fiercely that you doubt whether fun or a fight, or both, is to be the sequel; and, after a fixed, ferocious gaze into each other's eyes for a minute, they rush into a wild, delirious dance round the miamia, treading upon their drowsy companions on the line of their jig, ever and anon thrusting one of their fellow-dancers into the fire, and ringing the scandalized woods with the echoes of their discordant laughter, as their angry victims scramble out again, screeching with the pain of their burns. Many of them have at length fallen into a sleep heavy as their draughts and deep as their awful debasement; others are dropping off, one by one, torpid and inanimate as a snake after a gorge. The laughter, the dancing, the shouting, the screeching, brawling, fighting, and swearing grow more and more languid and declining, like their expiring fire. The dancers drop off breathless, exhausted, and sinking to sleep where they fell; and by and by, only one solitary, yawning, half-drunken savage-their idiot sentinel-sits moping like an owl, winking his eye at the fire, and gaping into its ever-shifting embers, as if he saw marvels in its rude kaleidoscope which fascinated his gaze and chained it there. Sleep-if it were not almost irreverent to the attributes of natural slumber to call such a scene of stupefaction by that name-laid a deadening hand upon their debauch, and the whole group lay powerless and insensible, as if the "unclean spirit" of drink had smitten each of them on the head and left them stunned and insensible under the blow! If the wild animals of the bush could moralise as in Esop's days, they might have blushed at the spectacle of their human aristocracy debasing themselves to a level so far beneath their own.

Though afraid of the white men, the aborigines have the reputation of being treacherous and cruel on occasions when they can reckon upon impunity; so I do not choose to introduce myself too suddenly into a company where the odds in point of numbers are against me. Mounting a bushy tree This was the portrait of the aborigines in a state hard by, I conceal myself, and overhear or rather of nature and intercourse with mere civilization. overlook their manoeuvres. The voracious meal Not a long while after, I saw a group of the abo over, the horrid drinking-can-a debasing import-rigines brought under the influence of grace and ation of the white man-is passed round the savage group, out of which each adult male takes a heavy draught of the raw, fiery whisky. Every moment increases the boisterous barbarism and delirium of some of them, the sullen, sottish stupidity of others, the melancholy or malice of still more, and betrays, in their worst forms, the secret idiosyncrasies of all. Grim faces, which had been innocent of soap and water since they were faces, grew more grim as the shades of evening deepened against their unwashed profiles, the fire illuminating at fitful intervals their gaunt and scowling impression. Now and then, the sounds of hateful brawl, succeeded by a scratch, a tearing, or a reciprocated kick, like the warfare of the beasts of the field, indicated, like a drink-dial, the progress of the debauch. The scream of a burnt child,

evangelical renovation. The latter were a much smaller assembly, a mere fireside circle-eleven persons in all-sitting round the blazing hearth in the large common room or hall of a thriving squatter on the Liverpool plains. Except himself, wife, and two children under twelve years old, every adult about his comparatively little farm was a native. Half missionary, half grazier, this man, originally a shepherd, had lost no time in acquir ing the language, nor opportunity of getting access to the natives that fell in with him on his solitary sheep-walk. He began at once with the sublime but simple story of Jesus-told them of the Son of God coming down from heaven, assuming a man's flesh and a man's heart-rehearsed again and again the tale of his sorrows and sufferings, his miracles and mercies, his cross and crown

opened the doctrine of repentance, beginning with tears and ending in triumph; and he scarcely ever varied his teaching, until at length one and then another of the natives stopped to hear more, and these were joined by others. Thus this shepherdpreacher in the wilderness gathered a little band of a dozen natives, including three of their wives, whom he taught to build huts about his own sheeling, and, in return for his instructions, they began to help him with his sheep. By-and-by he bought the station, as it was a remote one, and small, and within his well-husbanded means. His group of converts clung to him. With their aid, in another spring, he built his large timbered homestead, surrounding it with huts for his friends, so that they wrought, and worshipped, and lived in peace together. Their sabbaths were days of rest and devotion. They seemed to grow in grace and knowledge; and Christianity, their great civilizer, had taught them higher tastes and nobler aims than the rude traditions of their fathers. They learned to save, also, as well as to earn. They will be the founders of future native families of real lords of the soil. Their example will spread. They and theirs will form an unanswerable illustration of the sacred canon, "Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come."

Alas! that such instances as that just described should be so rare as to appear almost incredible. The informant from whom the writer received the materials of both this and the former sketch represented the happiness and quiet comfort of the squatter's home-circle as a refreshing contrast to many even of the white men's families which he visited. One can readily imagine the patriarchal settler in the midst of his mingled group of white and black faces, sitting, at the week's end, on the Saturday night, preparing, in the spirit of the Levitical prescript, for "the morrow of the holy sabbath." Enthroned in his high-backed chair, hollowed out from some ancient oak, the gnarls and the fissures in which are retained in the picturesque shape in which the sportive hand of time had left them, "the good man of the house" is reading the bible-one of the very few volumes he still possesses as cherished relics of connection with his own tongue and mother country. A hymn sung, and, their simple offering of praise ended, the good man rises in his place, and looking round as it were on the steps of his domestic altar to see if all were there, and none inattentive, vacant, or irreverent, he feels in the deepest secrets of his fatherly heart the joy and thankfulness of the conviction, "Here am I, and the children thou gavest me;" while no minster pomp nor cloistered awe ever reached the touching solemnity of his simple utterance of the words, "Let us pray!"

sit

The evening breezes seem to cease, as if some one bade them, for nothing should interrupt the sacred breathings of "the wind that bloweth where it listeth," that all there might "hear the sound thereof." As they separate for the night, each one seems to bear away in his countenance some indications of that light that lingered on the face Moses after his communings on the mount; and it prepares and attunes them, like an unction from above, for the high and holy celebrations of the morrow's sabbath day.

THE SNOW-DROP.
HAIL! timid messenger of Spring,
Thou dost glad tidings with thee bring,
Of lovely things for us in store,
Of wintry storm and tempest o'er.

Fair herald of thy beauteous race,
Venturing to smile in Winter's face;
How tremulous with hope and fear,
How spirit-like thou dost appear!

Soft seem thy silvery tones, and sweet,
From the green moss-bed at my feet;
Telling of music and of mirth,
And the rich coming bloom of earth.

And bright and fresh the robe will be
Wove for the meadow and the tree;
Gladness shall sparkle in the stream,
And sunlight o'er the hill-tops beam.

And yet on thy pale purity

What saddening thoughts are traced for me!
Oh! bitter tears that I have shed,
Since last I saw thee bend thy head.

Still doth thy voice seem from a clime
Ne'er trodden by the steps of time;
Art thou the spirit of that Spring
Of which immortal Hope doth sing?
Then ours is but a dream to thine,
A shadow, cast from bloom divine.
If such the glimpses that we see,
How beautiful thy home must be!

MARY LEWIS.

SONG OF THE SPRING.
My laughter has broke o'er the azure sky,
And the sombre clouds have arisen to fly;
My voice through the woods has again been heard,
And recall'd to its haunt the exiled bird.

Away o'er the meadows I've lightly trod,
And the flowers have sprung in the freshening sod;
I have breathed where the ice-bound waters lay,
And bright is the foam of the dancing spray.

I have waved my wings, and a rich perfume
Has floated around from the orchard's bloom;
I've glanced o'er the bed where the sick doth pine,
And wreathed round the lattice the rose and vine.
I've come to the haunts that I knew of yore-
To the rich man's lawn, to the cottage door;
But I see the gloom of the storm-cloud cast
O'er homes lit with love when I saw them last.

I miss full many a beautiful brow,
And many light footsteps are silent now:
Oh! where are they gone, the young and the bright,
Who greeted me last with such wild delight?

Are they laid in their dark and narrow bed?
Are they resting now with the silent dead?
Will they tread no more in the festal hall?
Will they bound no more at my joyous call?
The once happy face hath a shade of care;
In the brilliant eye I have mark'd a tear;
And the still, cold hearth, and the lonely bower,
Each tell of a world where Decay hath power!
I have made the earth like a fair young bride,
And now farewell, for I may not abide;
I go to the land that knows not of blight,
Where cometh no shadow of sorrow or night.

I shall see no graves of the lovely there,
For Death cannot breathe in celestial air;
I go,
where fadeth not blossom or tree:
Will ye come with me? will ye come with me?

MARY LEWIS.

Varieties.