BLACKS A NUISANCE

Taranaki Daily News, 5 September 1932, Page 7

BLACKS A NUISANCE

AUSTRALIANS’ ATTITUDE. “ONLY OWE THEM THE' GROUND.” Sydney, Aug. 26. In spite of all that the anthropologists could say at the Science Congress in praise of. the Australian aborigines, the tendency to regard them as a nuisance and an obstacle to settlement and progress seems too deeply rooted to be eradicated easily. At the Soldier Settlers’ Congress, a delegate from the Macleay district complained that “the constant presence of aborigines and halfcastes was depreciating the value of his holding.” He admitted that the blacks were “cleared out” when the holders were first induced to take up the land,, but they always came back; and he quite unconsciously explained the tenacious attachment of the natives to this patch of land when he said that it was “an old camping ground” of the aborigine. Fortunately, one of the veterans had sufficient imagination to realise the position and enough moral courage to retort, “The blacks were there before you.” It says little for our boasted British civilisation that when it superseded the primitive life of the indigenous peoples in Australia—and largely in New Zealand as well—it made very little effort to supply the surviving vestiges of the native population with any rational substitute. When Mark Twain had listened for some time to a frontiersman, who wanted to make a clean sweep oi the Red Indians, he said, “After all, we owe them nothing—only the ground on which wo have built the United States” But this splendid bit of irony was quite lost upon the man to whom it was addressed.