"Wanganui Herald," May 10, 1891.

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

"Wanganui Herald," May 10, 1891.

" ' The Black Police'—a very timely and powerfully written book from the pen of an ex-journalist of this Colony. We must confess on reading Mr. Vogan's book, we were loth to believe that matters could be so bad as he paints them, in these days of improved civilisation, and thought that he must be giving some of the darker deeds of the early days a recent date, and palming them oft as t'hing3 of yesterday. Mr. Vogan gives vivid and horrifying descriptions of how the blacks are ' dispersed' in Queensland to-day, and did space permit avc would reproduce the picture of one of these bloodcurdling scenes from Mr. Vogan's pen. We commend the perusal of the book itself to our readers, who will find within its covers much that will cause them to ask with Bret Harte's unsophisticated hero, 'Is our civilisation a dream ?' If, like us, they are sceptical at first of the truth of Mr. Vogan's statement that ' dispersing , is only another name for ' butchering,' or even worse treatment of the helpless aborigines, and that the latter are hunted like dingoes by the Native.Police Officers, with their small but well-trained packs of black trackers, who enjoy the work with fiendish glee, they have only to recall to mind the telegrams on the subject which are constantly appearing. Mr. Vogan asserts that the Queensland Black Police frequently arrest the wrong natives wilfully, and give them a chance to escape whilst en route for the nearest goal. The prisoners, thinking they see their way to escape, attempt to do so, and their black captors coolly shoot them down, and the white officer in charge reports the circumstance, minus the facts ?j$ to wrongful arrest and the bait held out to tempt the prisoners to escape. Mr. Vogan's book, read in the light of the disclosures that are of almost daily occurrence, should do some good, and shame the authorities of Queensland and the other Australian colonies, within whose borders these atrocities are perpetrated, into putting down such crimes. The Black Police oi Queensland has always been a crying evil, as its dark deeds have been frequently condemned and exposed by those who have had an opportunity of knowing something of their methods of ' dispersing ' their unlucky fellows, who presume to camp or hunt in the country taken up by pioneer squatters, whose flocks and herds are held of more value than human life. Nemesis has overtaken these latter, who are now in turn harried by the shearers on strike, and outsiders who know for the first time through Mr. Vogairs book the heartless ways of outlying squatters where the blacks are concerned, will see in some of their present troubles from the shearers' strike, a just retribution for crimes which have long cried in vain for vengeance."