"THE CRIMES OF COLONISATION."

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3493, 16 September 1882, Page 4

"THE CRIMES OF COLONISATION."

These are hard words, observes the Pall Mall Gazette, bnt who can say they are undeserved ? Not assuredly any of those who have read the accounts given by recent travellers in the Southern Seas of the state of things in Polynesia, or the still more terrible narratives of those who describe the slavery which has been established in Queensland, or the war of extermination which has been waged in Northern Australia. Mr John Wisker, of Melbourne, contributes to the current number of the Fortnightly Review an account of the doings of Englishmen under the Southern Cross which would be pronounced incredible but for the confirmation supplied by other witnesses. M. Rochefort is for ever sneering at the nation which scatters tracks over tbe universe, and at the same time mercilessly exterminates the aborigines at tbe Antipodes ; and for once M. Rochefort's sarcasm is barbed with truth. It is in Northern Queensland and Cape York that this process of colonisation by massacre is to be seen at its best or worst. Tho ' pioneers of civilisation,' gold diggers and adventurers, with a liberal leaven of scoundrelism of two woidds, have been waging for years past an intermittent war with the blackfellows, who, it seems, are stronger, braver, and more independent than the degenerate specimens of humanity who are being crowded out of existence in Victoria and in New South Wales. As the pioneers took no women with them, they supplied themselves with the wives of the aborigines. Human nature being the same all the world over, a fierce war of reprisals began, and is kept up to this hour. Every native trouble is said to be traceable to the same fatal cause. The black robbed of his wife slays the first white who crosses his path. The colonists combine and massacre all the blackfellows within range of their rifles. And so it goes on. Even when there is no blood feud, pot-shots are taken at ' niggers ' as if they were wild ducks, and their women are regarded as the common property of the first comer. Children are born of these lawless unions, but none survive. Whether the parents kill them or tho hybrid lacks stamina to face the climate re- ' mains a mystery. Every year the black man is hunted further and further back from the lands which are coveted by the white, and in northern Queensland ere long it will be as it is now in New Sotith Wales, where, with a territory as large as France and England combined, 750,000 colonists protest they can find no room in which to locate the miserable dwindling remnant of the original owners of the soil. The colonists, however, do not do all the murders themselves. They massacre by deputy. Under the guise of a police force they have armed a body of blacks as savage and more drunken than there naked brethren, and these they periodically lead fortli to ' disperse ' gatherings of the tribes. The story which Mr Wisker has to tell of the state of tilings on the cane plantations of southern Queensland is not less horrible. On tho strength of official documents he maintains that in many cases the imported Polynesians are actually worse off than slaves. The labour traffic, despite all attempts at legislation, is in his opinion, little better than an organised slave trade. On paper the regulations seems to be satisfactory. In practice they are too often nugatory. The law provides that the native shall only be engaged for three years, at the rate of £6 a year, besides food, lodging, and clothes. The native is paid his £18 at the end of his term of service, and is then returned to his island. If he dies before the three years expire, his master saves both his wage 3 and the expense of sending him home. The economic problem, therefore, which confronts every cane-grower is, first, how to extract from his the maximum amount of labor on a minimum quantity of food ; and, secondly, how to arrange for his death as near as possible to the close of his three years' service. A skilful canegrower who can use "up his laborers in two years and clever months is £17 10s in pocket. A clumsy hand who works his man to death in two years only gains £12. '1 bus a system ingeniously devised so as to combine all the (worst features of slavery and of freedom has been established under our eyes, arid no one seems to care. It is slavery plus murder. Tbe omployer is allowed to pocket his workman's wages on condition he kills him off before the end of three years. Tho result is that in Queensland the death-rate of Polynesians between tho age of sixteen and thirty-two varies from 80 to 100 per 1,000. In England the death rate is only nine. The fact is vouched for by Government inspectors and police magistrates. We have spent millions in emancipating glares

and in crusading against the slave trade. Surely we are not 'going to allow without even a protest the gradual conversion of this great colony into a slave State.'