RACIAL PROBLEMS.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 18987, 3 July 1933, Page 5

RACIAL PROBLEMS.

MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES

CONDITIONS IN NORTH.

(From a Correspondent.)

MELBOURNE, June 28

Addressing the Rotary Club at Bendigo to-day Mr R. B. Plowman, the author of “The Man from Oodnadattu” and for many years a missionary in Central Australia, said that sentimental regard for black people had led to such sweeping statements as that the blacks were being wiped out by disease introduced by white men, that the trouble between white and black men resulted from the white men stealing lubras, and that the whites were driving blacks out of the more fertile country into the waterless desert, where they died from starvation.

Mr Plowman said he had travelled 18,000 miles in Central Australia in five years, and could not recall meeting a consumptive black. The decay of blacks was hastened by the adoption of clothes and white man’s food, the latter being responsible for decreased fecundity. Mr Plowman said that lie did not deny that immorality existed between the whites and the blacks. There was ample evidence of it, but it had to be remembered that tire blacks in their native state were unmoral and not immoral. He firmly believed church organisations were using scientific, common-sense methods to assist the blacks, but itinerant misisonaries were a potential danger to both black and whiles.