was to Bathurst and Wellington, and through the pastoral tracts west of those counties-Colonel Mundy gets over much more paper than ground. He is pleasantly digressive. His book's second title of Rambles was intended, he says, to apply equally to pen and to person. Accordingly, bush-ranging being started as a subject of conversation, he stops his horses for a chapter, in which he throws together a number of amusing and curious stories about runaway convicts, highwaymen, fights between police and banditti, and skirmishes with the aborigines. Then a crack of the whip, and off he goes again, past Blackheath and the Vale of Clwyd-names suggestive of home past Hassan's Walls-a crescent of castellated crags, which in outline remind him of the fortress of Gwalior -threading the recesses of the Blue Mountains and the eternal gum-tree avenues, to the estate of Mr William Lawson, on Macquarie Plains, where he and his companions take up their abode for a time, and where he receives a most favourable impression of Australian hospitality. "At this Australian country seat," he says, "120 miles from Sydney, at which emporium European supplies arrive, after four or five months' voyage, enhanced nearly double in price, and with the superadded risk, difficulty, and expense consequent on a dray journey of another half-month across almost impassable mountains, we found a well damasked table for thirty-five or forty persons, handsome china and plate, excellent cookery, a profusion of hock, claret, and champagne, a beautiful dessert of European fruits-in short, a really capital English dinner. Now, I assert that this repast afforded as strong and undeniable a proof of British energy, in the abstract, as did the battle of the Nile, the storming of Badajoz, the wonderful conflict of Meanee, or any other exploit accomplished by the obstinate resolution, as well as dashing valour, of John Bull. Be it remembered that, within the memory of many hale old men, there was no white inhabitant of this vast continent; and nothing more eatable than a haunch of kangaroo, more drinkable than a cup of water, even where Sydney now stands; and that, little more than a quarter of a century ago, those Plains, to which most of the luxuries of the Old World now find their way, were not even known to exist." Mr Lawson is a large grazier and cattle-breeder, one of the most extensive in Australia. Colonel Mundy does not supply statistics of his flocks, herds, and acres, but we may form some idea of them from the account given of the territorial and other possessions of Mr Icely, another substantial settler, whose "estate and live stock are said to consist of 50,000 acres of purchased land-purchased when the price was five shillings an acre-how much of granted land I did not learn; with, of course, hundreds of thousands of acres of pasture rented from the Crown; 25,000 sheep, 3000 head of cattle, and some 300 horses. Near the dwelling-house is one paddock-as it is modestly styled consisting of 3000 acres, another of 1500 acres; and there are about forty-five miles of substantial three-railed fencing on the property. This latter article alone must have cost a small fortune." During his stay at Mr Lawson's, Colonel Mundy obtained some insight into the habits and customs of the aborigines. A "corobbery," or native dance, was got up for the amusement of the guests, and a most transcendent caper it appears to have been. The "gins" (native women) drummed upon a skin stretched tightly over their knees, screaming monotonously the while. The men, naked, or nearly so, were painted from top to toe, the favourite pattern being an imitation of a skeletonspine and ribs picked out with a white pigment, and broad lines of the same down the legs. A war dance was the first business; then came a singular kind of gymnastics, which might be entitled the snake-polka. "They all sprang into the air a wonderful height, and, as their feet again touched the ground, with the legs wide astride, the muscles of the thighs were set a quivering in a singular manner; and the straight white lines on the limbs being thus put in oscillation, each stripe became for the moment a writhing serpent." This was followed by a zoological sauteuse-imitations of the dingo or native dog, of the emu and kangaroo. "When all were springing together in emulation of a scared troop of their own marsupial brutes, nothing could be more laughable, or a more ingenious piece of mimicry. As usual in savage dances, the time was kept with an accuracy never at fault. The gentlemen of our party alone attended the Corobbery; for, whatever heraldry might do, decency could not have described any one of the performers as a 'salvage man cincted, proper!' The men were tall and straight as their own spears, many of them nearly as thin, but all surprisingly active." So great are the agility and address of these savages, that a native servant, Fishhook by name, allowed the Colonel, who describes himself as tolerably handy with a pebble, to pelt him with stones as fast as he could throw them, at twenty paces. Those aimed at his head and body he turned aside, and jumped over those that threatened to leg him. The Australian is dexterous with the spear, and will knock over a kangaroo at fifty or sixty paces. But he is not always in the humour to do his best, either in dancing or using his weapons, for the amusement of strangers. At Wellington, a noted good spearsman repeatedly missed a piece of bark Colonel Mundy set up as a mark for him. "I put a sixpence on the top, and, taking a policeman's carbine, made the black fellow understand that if I knocked it down before him, I would re-pocket it. Whilst pretending to take aim, I saw the savage brace up his muscular little figure, fix his fierce emu-like eye on the target, and in an instant he had transfixed its centre at sixty yards. Having put the 'white money' into his mouth, he had to exert all his strength with his foot on the sheet of bark, to withdraw the weapon." We had the Bushranger's chapter earlier in the volume. This seventh chapter might be entitled the savage chapter, being particularly devoted to the aborigines, a fierce and brutal race, whose aggressions on the white men, formerly frequent, have not yet entirely ceased, although they are confined to the border districts. There, a native mounted police, commanded by British officers, has been found most effectual in repressing their turbulence and robberies. There is great competition for admission to this corps. No bounty is needed; threepence a day is the rate of pay; the uniform is a light dragoon un dress; the men are young, agile, and strong, handle their arms skilfully and ride well; and so much are they dreaded by the evil-disposed amongst their countrymen, that the mere appearance of a section of them clears the district of predatory tribes. According to Colonel Mundy's account, the New Hollander, in his natural state, is little better than a wild beast -treacherous, bloodthirsty, cruel, and ungrateful; and-it is the Colonel's conviction, although some have disputed the fact-a most atrocious cannibal. "Old Bull," the brawny chieftain of the tribe which exhibited the Corobbery for the entertainment of the travellers a herculean pagan, of prodigious pectoral development, across the top of whose breast, when he stood upright, a spear rested as upon a shelf lay under heavy suspicion of having, in his earlier days, "treated one or more Englishmennot to mention black game-precisely as an Englishman would have treated a woodcock; i.e. brought him down in good style, given him a turn or two before the fire, and discussed him with zest and appetite." Colonel Mundy, whilst kindly abstaining from details Blue Books and other sources of inforof the subject, refers the reader to mation in corroboration of his charge against the Australians, and mentions a case upon record where an infant was butchered and eaten by its own mother; which he declares, with horrible facetiousness, to be "marsupial instinct pushed to the utmost extremity!" Now, there is nothing to extenuate the Australian's unnatural and abominable partiality to human flesh. With kangaroo venison, the emu in lieu of the pheasant, with fish and wildfowl, (to catch which his women manufacture nets,) to say nothing of snakes, guanas, grubs, sweet acacia gum, and bulrush pulp ground into flour, he has certainly no need to have recourse to what Far West trappers denominate "manmeat." Honey, too, he loves, and is ingenious in obtaining it. Catching a stray bee, he sticks upon its little busy body with gum an atom of white down from the owl or swan, and, releasing the scared insect, follows it by eye and foot to the hole in the hollow tree where the comb is con cealed." There is something so bucolic in this little vignette, that one can scarcely imagine the light-footed child of the forest quitting the chase of the honey-bee to transfix a Christianfirst with his quivering lance, and then upon his ready spit. Did he limit his attacks to the flocks and herds of the white intruders, some allowance might be made for him. Colonel Mundy rather stands up for the savage in this respect. "If Mephistopheles," he says, "could read the New South Wales police reports, how would he grin on finding that 'certain aboriginal blacks had been apprehended and punished for stealing dead timber, the property of Mr Whiteman, for firewood'! The said Mr Whiteman had purchased the land, on which the timber grew, from the Government, or had received it in free grant from the same What did the Government give for these 'waste lands of the Crown' Nothing! The grandfather of the prisoner probably hunted over this very ground-the culprit himself was perhaps born under the very gum-tree whose fallen boughs he had been stealing.' . . What wonder that the native retaliates source. upon the sheep and cattle of the palefaced trespasser on his land and food! He thinks, perhaps, in his primeval simplicity, that he has as good right to beef and mutton as John Bull-calf, the AngloAustralian, has to kangaroo-tail soup. Can one reasonably expect that any man, whatsoever his complexion, possessing a vigorous appetite and no moral code, will dine off grubs and Hizards, when a sirloin or a saddle is to be had for the cast of a spear?" Colonel Mundy does not expect to reckon amongst his readers persons so artless as to take this sort of reasoning more seriously than it is intended. Saddle and sirloin are dear joints to the black, and his butcher's bill is usually pretty heavy. Australian shepherds, overseers, and stockmen, (cattle-drivers,) often emancipated convicts, or ticket-ofleave men-are neither patient under injury nor merciful in victory. They are soon exasperated by savage depredations, which entail upon them great trouble and harsh reproof. The blacks will drive off a flock of three or four hundred sheep in the night time. Ten of these are perhaps all they make mutton of, but the others are dispersed through the bush, giving the shepherds three or four days' labour to collect them. Or a herd of cattle are speared, mutilated, or driven off. The shepherd gets blame, on his owner's next visit. The owner gone, he gets to horse with some of his comrades, and avenges the wigging he has received by shooting half a tribe, and scattering the rest. This only makes the matter worse. "Some poor solitary shepherd or hutkeeper, perhaps utterly unconnected with this retaliatory expedition, repays with his life the unnecessary severity of the white party. His hut is robbed, his brains are dashed out with a club. Three or four high-bred horses are speared, an imported Durham bull, value two hundred guineas, or a Saxon ram, worth fifty, is hamstrung, and the rage of the proprietor himself is now aroused. Reprisals are undertaken on a large scaleof the Government, which is bound to a scale that either never reaches the ears protect alike the white and the black subject; or, if it does reach them, finds them conveniently deaf." Extermination is then the wordwholesale massacres of men, women, and children. Colonel Mundy entertains no doubt that the black population is being rapidly extirpated. These terrible razzias, occurring in the remote back settlements and pastures, are for the most part ignored by the local authorities, crown land commissioners, police magistrates, and others, or else considered as justifiable negrocide. The Colonel tells us some very horrid tales of the treatment of the aborigines-the shooting of pregnant women, and the placing of "damper," (dough cakes baked over the ashes,) seasoned with arsenic or strychnine, in the way of the savages. For this last description of cowardly murder, colonists have been brought to the gallows, and certainly they richly merited it. The temptations to such atrocities, as well as to armed collisions, have been diminished by the institution of the black mounted police, who are a great check on savage aggressions, and who beguile their leisure by hunting down white bushrangers. This latter sport is occasionally engaged in by civilian blacks when a reward is to be earned; and woe betide the bushranger whose "However superior in bodily strength, however desperate his courage, the robber has no chance against the black scout, unless possessed of firearms. The latter attacks him with a running fire of stones, thrown with such vigour and accuracy, that a few minutes would suffice to cut The to pieces or disable the former. superior agility of the savage effectually prevents close quarters; and as for resisting with the same weapons, the poor clumsy Saxon might as well pelt a shadow. An instance was related to me of a native following for days, unsuspectedly, the steps of a runaway prisoner armed with a musket. Having exhausted the little food he had brought with him, the white man was at length compelled by hunger to fire at a bird, and, ere he could reload, he was felled by a stone, followed by a sustained volley-something like that of Perkins's steam-gun-which soon placed both man and musket in the power of the wily savage." Tiger as he is in his state of nature, the Australian, Colonel Mundy believes, is capable of transformation That he posinto a civilised man. sesses energy and ingenuity is sufficiently proved by the arms and implements he manufactures, and by his address in using them. Enrolled in the police, he makes an excellent soldier, sober, obedient, and submissive to discipline. But although much zeal and money have been expended in endeavours to civilise and Christianise him, they have been misMissions, directed and ineffectual. however they at first may have seemed to flourish, have been failures in the end. It is never very difficult, as Colonel Mundy remarks, to make "soup and blanket" proselytes. The Apsley mission, in Wellington Valley, throve at first. The natives went to school, and were particularly punctual at feeding-time. But settlers came into the neighbourhood, with convict servants, misleading the black women, selling grog to the men, and teaching both to deride alike their lessons and their instructors. And wild natives came and camped hard by, their proximity rousing all the vagrant and "I can picture to myself," says Colonel 'Give me again my hollow tree, My kangaroo and liberty!' was their exclamation, as these children of the bush, tired of boiled mutton, turnips, potatoes, and tea, and of the twaddle (as they thought it) of their teachers, relapsed into their natural state of savage hood." The mission house at Moreton Bay was plundered by the very savages for whose benefit it was erected, and the missionaries had to defend themAll this was selves with firearms. surely discouraging enough, but still the philanthropists have not despaired; and Colonel Mundy, without committing himself to a decided opinion, seems to entertain hopes of good results from a combined and energetic movement for the conversion of the Australasian heathen, commenced in the autumn of 1850, and powerfully stimulated by Bishop Selwyn and other earnest and active dignitaries of the Colonial Church. As a set-off to the evil he has recorded of them, and as proof that virtue may be found, although but rarely, in the_breast of Australian savages, the Colonel gives an interesting account of the adventures of four Englishmen on a surveying expedition in the northeast part of New Holland. The chief of the party, Mr Kennedy, a fine, handsome, enterprising young fellow, had a black servant, named JackyJacky. It is Jacky's narrative, elicited by a subsequent judicial investigation, that Colonel Mundy transcribes; and, but for its length, we would extract it here, certain that it would interest all readers. Accompanied only by the black, Mr Kennedy was compelled to separate from the three other men, one of whom was badly wounded, and another lame. He was tracked with dogged perseverance and patient ferocity by a party of aborigines, who at last, when he was enfeebled by famine, ventured to approach near enough to spear him. Jacky stuck by him to the very last, buried his body, underwent terrible sufferings, and finally rescued the two survivors of the party, displaying, as Colonel Mundy justly says, "heroic endurance, unshaken fidelity, and devoted courage. Jacky's simple and unassuming narrative fully justifies the high eulogium. Black swans of this description are rare birds in Australia, and it would be highly imprudent for white gentlemen upon solitary rambles to build upon the fidelity of their sable followers, founding their confidence on this remarkable instance. In those latitudes, however, as may easily be imagined, where a large portion of the population proceeded originally from hulks and prisons, European servants are very often as untrustworthy as natives. And the better sort-those who would not cut your throat or rob you-are idle, drunken, and impudent. The article is scarce, the supply small, and the rascals take advantage of the state of the market. As recently as Colonel Mundy's departure from the colony in 1851, really good domestics, especially men, were hardly to be found. "Bad ones vibrated from pantry to pantry, from coach-box to coach-box of the Sydney gentry, and smiled impudently in the face of the master who last discharged them, well knowing that if they could lay a table or drive a pair of horses they could always get a place, and no impertinent questions asked as to character." Five hundred or a thousand good servants, shipping themselves from England to Australia, would find, the Colonel adds, prompt employment and high wages, and would remedy this crying evil, whose extent may be judged of from the fact that in almost every house in which the Governor and his party put up during their tour, although the gentlemen who received them were most eager to show hospitality and attention, the very servant on whom their comfort most depended thought proper to get us. drunk-probably to show his independence, which he usually further evinced by insolence to his master. But any characterless scamp gets & good place and high wages in Australia, merely for the offering himself. Such was the case before the diggings were discovered; since that discovery we may imagine the state of things, or, if not, the newspapers will tell it In 1846, when stopping with Mr Icely, the great landholder and grazier before-mentioned, Colonel Mundy was sketching in the bush (and we may here parenthetically praise the fifteen excellent illustrations distributed through his volumes, especially those representing active scenes kangaroo hunting, skirmishes, &c.) when he was startled by a rough voice close to his ear. He was at some distance from the house, be it observed, and his arms were pencils, not pistols. cct Any hands wanted on this 'stablishment?' "It was a tall, ruffianly-looking fellow, with his personals wrapped up in an opossum rug which he carried on a stick, and he was followed by two as rascally looking dogs. "What can you do?' said I, as if I were the lord of the manor. Well, most things,' replied he; split, saw, wash, shear, break horses what not.' "Go away up to the stores. The overseer will put you on the books, I dare say,' I rejoined, only anxious to get rid of so unpromising a comrade; and it was so. In a town he would have been arrested on suspicion. In the country, and at shearing time, he got £1 a-week and full rations, and no questions asked." What does the reader suppose is the favourite pastime of a very numerous class of the rough customers who find such ready employment and handsome pay in the grazing and cattlebreeding districts of New South Wales namely, of the shepherds? Virgil, Florian, and other great authorities, have impressed us with the conviction that a certain amount of sentiment and poetry is inseparable from the keeping of sheep. But when we learn that the swains in charge are of the queer sort usually found in Australia-uncouth gentlemen, carrying their " possibles " in opossum rugs, or hired convicts, emancipated, ex |
