Westralian Slavery.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXIV, Issue 7496, 20 April 1899, Page 4

Westralian Slavery.

TREATMENT OF NATIVES.

Western Australia, like the United States, has its " color n question. In the northern desert of sand and spinifex, with its scorching heat and blinding glare, the European does not thrive so well as other races. The pearl fisheries and gold have attracted a picturesque, but heterogeneous mixture of races—Afghan camel drivers, Japanese, Malays (who are pearlers in the season and loafers out of it), African negroes, Chinese cooks a"d laundresses. Menial work is left to the colored races, who are also debarred from securing miners' rights Blacks are subjected to the punishment of the lasb, partly on the ground that the skin which can stand roasting in a tropical sun cannot be very sensitive to pain, but chiefly because prison is rather a place of enjoyment to them, since they can there have three meals a day without trouble. On the stations the blacks are generally well treated, having plenty to eat find little to do , —their idea of Paradise. Women and children are employed as housemaids and nurses, and the sleek Australian "Topsy," in her scarlet petticoat, grey shirt and wide-1 awake, is a good deal happier than she was ! in her native state. The boys are trained as i shepherd?, though squatters say if you get a black man to look after sheep, you must get a white man to look after the black. These black servants are the bane of the Weatralian runholders, one of whom told Calvert | that the very thought of them spoiled his pleasure trip. They desert when they choose, are incorrigibly lazy and untrustworthy, understand no argument, and dread no punishment but flogging. They still gp ar each other, and treat their women with revolting brutality- The system of indenturing natives was begun by the Aboriginal Act of 1886, which permitted the employment of natives by contract, and charged the police to protect them. In the first instance, the natives sign their mark to the agreement, and the attendant magistrate must see that no coercion has been used. After signing they are virtually slaves, receiving food, sometimes onlyjbroken victuals, no wages, and little clothing, and being obliged to work as long as their master orders. The cases which have created the present excitement are bad enough, but it woald be wrong to compare them with the lynchings and burnings In Georgia. Brokman, whose station Calvert visited in 1597, placed an aboriginal in the stocks for a whole afternoon and night, and flogged him, for what offence we are not told. He was fined L 5, and the indentures of his assigned servants were cancelled. The other case referred to recently by the St. James Gazette occurred last November when De Pledge and Orkney, charged with assaulting natives were fined and had their names struck off the Commission as J.P.'s. The fact of their conviction shows at least that there is not in Western Australia, as in Black America, a conspiracy to prevent the punishment of the white 3 for cruelty to the blacks.—Christchurch Press.