Page 2 Advertisements Column 3

Auckland Star, Volume XXIII, Issue 16, 20 January 1892, Page 2

Wy A. J. T@o__.-f.

"Lyttelion Tirraos."

" 'The Black Police.'—Can it be possible that in these days of grace—for the story is written of the present time—that such tilings, such horrors, as Mr. Vogan describes" with revolting relish, can happen in a civilised British community 2"

"Christen urch Press."

" 'The Black Police."—lf only one-third of the scenes depicted in the book by Mr. Vogan arc true, it is time such a reproach was wiped off the fair fame of Australia. . . . Some of the scenes are painted with a good deal of power. The discovery by Claude Angland of the rival to Mount Morgan is a wonderfully clever piece of word painting; the scepery and the weird surroundings of the cavern being described very powerfully. . . . ' The Black Police' is well worth perusal."

"Otag-o Times," Juno 6, 1891.

"The book aims at being the 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' of Queensland, and the horrors in Mrs. Stowc'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 wilds. This communication is much in the oracular style of those potsherd or parchment documents which we know so well in Rider Haggard's story. There is more in the paper than at hrst meets the eye. Moved thereto by certain mysterious symbols on the paper, Angland proceeds to Sydney, bound for Queensland, in 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 niost absolute ownership over the persons of his black slaves, tying tlieni up 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."

" Wang-anui 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 he 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 oil as tilings of yesterday. Mr. Vogan gives vivid and horrifying descriptions of now the blacks are ' dispersed ' in .Queensland to-day, and did space permit we would reproduce the picture of one of these bloodcurdling scenes from Mr. Vogan's pen. We commend the perusal of the hook itself to our readers, who will find within its covers much that will cause them to ask with j 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 trucker*, who enjoy the work with fiendish glee, they have only to recall to mind the telegram's 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 p.s 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 of Queensland has always been a cryim' evil as its dark deeds have ' been frequently condemned and exposed by those who have had an opportunity of knowing some<-hin" of their methods of ' dispersing' their unlucky fellows, who presume to camp or hunt hi the country taken up by pioneer squatters, whose docks and herds are held of more value than human life. Nemesis has overtaken these latter, who are now "-n turn harried by the shearers on strike ami outsiders who know for the first'time through Mr. Vogan's book the heartless ways of outlying squatters where the blacks are concerned, will see in some of their present troubles from tbe shearers' strike, a just retribution for crimes which i have long cried in vain for vengeance."