Citation de iarsenea
Largely for these reasons no one knows how many Aborigines were in Australia when Britons first settled it. The best estimates suggest that at the beginning of occupation the Aboriginal population was about 300,000, though possibly as high as a million. What is certain is that in the first century of settlement those numbers fell catastrophically. By the end of the nineteenth century the number of Aborigines was probably no more than 50,000 or 60,000. Most of this decline, it must be said, was inadvertant. Aborigines had almost no resistance to European diseases : smallpox, pleurisy, syphilis, even chickenpox and the milder forms of influenza often cut swathes through the native populations. But where Aborigines remained, they were sometimes treated in the most heartless and wanton manner.
In Taming the Great South Land, William J. Lines details examples of the most appalling cruelty by settlers towards the natives- of Aborigines butchered for dog food; of an Aboriginal woman forced to watch her husband killed, and then made to wear his decapitated head around her neck; of another chased up a tree and tormented from below with rifle shots.[...] What is perhaps most shocking is how casually much of this was done, and at levels of the society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania, written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day with a ' respectacle young gentleman ' to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend, the young gentleman spied a form of crouched in hidind behind a fallen tree. Stepping over to investigate and ' finding it only to be a native ' , the appalled Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native's breast and ' shot him dead on the spot. '
Such behaviour was never virtually treated as a crime- indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ' inflict such punishment as they may merit '- as open an invitation to genocide as can be found in English Law. Fifteen years later our old friend Lachlan Macquarie authorized soldiers to shoot any group of Aborigines greater than six in number, even if unarmed and entirely innocent of purpose, even if the number included women and children.
In Taming the Great South Land, William J. Lines details examples of the most appalling cruelty by settlers towards the natives- of Aborigines butchered for dog food; of an Aboriginal woman forced to watch her husband killed, and then made to wear his decapitated head around her neck; of another chased up a tree and tormented from below with rifle shots.[...] What is perhaps most shocking is how casually much of this was done, and at levels of the society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania, written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day with a ' respectacle young gentleman ' to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend, the young gentleman spied a form of crouched in hidind behind a fallen tree. Stepping over to investigate and ' finding it only to be a native ' , the appalled Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native's breast and ' shot him dead on the spot. '
Such behaviour was never virtually treated as a crime- indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ' inflict such punishment as they may merit '- as open an invitation to genocide as can be found in English Law. Fifteen years later our old friend Lachlan Macquarie authorized soldiers to shoot any group of Aborigines greater than six in number, even if unarmed and entirely innocent of purpose, even if the number included women and children.
