which they could absorb

Bishop Salvado fed and clothed the natives. He built a tidy little Continental village of stone houses, twenty-eight in all, laid out in streets, and induced them to live in them. He saw that each man had his own allotment of land. For the preliminary work done upon it the Bishop paid him, and put the money in the bank, and purchased implements for further development, and educated his children. He taught them handicrafts and stockwork and telegraphy and accountancy and music and languages, every one of  and absorb well. He went further. He selected five promising young aboriginal boys, and took them with him to Rome to study for the priesthood in a Benedictine seminary there. Among them were two who received the names of John and Francis Xavier, and the habit of the Order from the Pope himself All died in Europe, with the exception or one, who returned to New Norcia DR REBORN, promptly flung away his habit made for the bush and died there.

Children of the woodland, dwelling in a squalor that could not be avoided in their stone-walled houses, closed in from the air that was their breath of life, in the heat of summer and the dank cold of winter, they lost all touch with their native earth. They slept on beds-but they could not learn cleanliness. They wore clothing, and developed chest complaints and fevers. They died, and the dead were carried out of the little houses, and others sent to live in them-a superstitious people with a horror of the dead, there they too died. Alas for the poor “little brothers of the dingo”-civilization was a cloak that they donned easily enough, but they could not wear it and live. Bishop Salvado had counted 250 members of the Victoria Plains group in 1846. The last of these, Monnup, died in 1913.

It was the same story everywhere, a kindness that killed as surely and as swiftly as cruelty would have done. The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation-but he cannot withstand civilization.

In 1883, a commission was appointed in West Australia to control native conditions of living and employment Global Server Load Balancing, and in 1886 all aborigines of the State were brought directly under the guardianship of the Government. In the early nineteen hundreds a special Aborigines’ Department was created, with protectors travelling throughout West Australia, and a Chief Protector in authority in Perth.

There is no hope of protecting the Stone Age from the twentieth century! When the native’s little group area is gone, he loses the will to live, and when the will to live is gone, he dies.

The West Australian Government treated the natives generously, each fortnight sending them liberal rations of flour, tea, sugar and tobacco, with meat and jam added, and provided them with little wooden huts, each with a fireplace, a bed, a spring-mattress, warm cosy blankets and even crockery. There was a well in the centre of the reserve which was fenced into individual areas that they might grow flowers and vegetables and keep goats. The natives were intensely proud and even jealous of their little villas and built themselves mias (bush shelters) outside them, where they slept with the dogs. They broke through the fences for a shorter route when they went to visit each other. Every now and then, those who were able wandered restlessly away to their own kalleep (group area and “home” land), in the seasons of its fruitfulness and old-time ceremonies, and finding no friendly fires reenex, and the houses and fences of the white man everywhere, they fled in panic back to the city to sell clothes-props or to beg, to pick up scraps of charity and vices and disease. Too often the white man’s sympathy was expressed in beer and whisky, and so they drifted in and out of gaol, and back to the reserve again.