"Otago Times," June 6, 1891.

Auckland Star, Volume XXII, Issue 250, 21 October 1891, Page 7

"Otago Times," June 6, 1891.

"The book aims at being the 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' of Queensland, and the horrors in Mrs. Stowe's book are hardly more horrible than the facts recorded here. Claud Angland, the hero of the novel, who is in Auckland when the story begins, receives the last message of an uncle who has died while exploring the Australian Avilds. This communication is much in the oracular style of those potsherd or parchment documents which we know so well in Kider Haggard's story. There ia more in the paper than at iirst meets the eye. Moved thereto by certain mysterious symbols on the paper, Angland proceeds to Sydney, bound for Queensland, m quest of the spot where his uncle died, which we may here say he ultimately reached, discovering at a certain place indicated a Mount Morgan mine, which made him wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. The chief part of the novel, however, is taken up with the Queensland squatter and his treatment of the blacks. According to the author there is a firmly established slavery of the worst kind, by which the white master exercises the most absolute ownership over the persons of his black slaves, tying them iip and brutally lashing them for trivial offences, and hunting them down with all the apparatus of dogs and guns if they attempt to run away and rejoin their tribes."