The squatters were assisted in their endeavours to diminish the numbers of their live stock by their neighbours, both black and white.  It is absurd to blame the aborigines for killing sheep and cattle.  You might as well say it is immoral for a cat to catch mice.  Hunting was their living; the land and every animal thereon was theirs; and after we had conferred on them, as usual, the names of savages and cannibals, they were still human beings; they were our neighbours, to be treated with mercy; and to seize their lands by force and to kill them was robbery and murder.  The State is a mere abstraction, has neither body nor soul, and an abstraction cannot be sent either to heaven or hell.  But each individual man will be rewarded according to his works, which will follow him.  Because the State erected a flag on a bluff overlooking the sea, Sandy McBean was not justified in shooting every blackfellow or gin he met with on his run, as I know he did on the testimony of an eye-witness.  This is the age of whitewash.  There is scarcely a villain of note on whose character a new coat has not been laboriously daubed by somebody, and then we are asked to take a new view of it.  It does not matter very much now, but I should prefer to whitewash the aboriginals.

J. P. Fawkner wrote:  “The military were not long here before the Melbourne district was stained with the blood of the aborigines, yet I can safely say that in the year in which there was neither governor, magistrate, soldier, nor policemen, not one black was shot or killed in the Melbourne district, except amongst or by the blacks themselves.  Can as much be said of any year since?  I think not.”

In the year 1844 Mr. Latrobe was required to send to the Council in Sydney a return of all blacks and whites killed in the Port Phillip district since its first settlement.  He said forty whites had been killed by the blacks, and one hundred and thirteen blacks had been reported as killed by the whites; but he added, “the return must not be looked upon as correct with respect to the number of aborigines killed.”  The reason is plain.  When a white man murdered a few blacks it was not likely that he would put his neck into the hangman’s noose by making a formal report of his exploit to Mr. Latrobe.  All the surviving blackfellow could say was:  “Quamby dead —­long time—­white-fellow—­plenty—­shoot ’em.”

He related in eight words the decline and fall of his race more truly than the white man could do it in eight volumes.

It is not so easy a task to justify the white men who assisted the squatters to diminish the numbers of their stock.  They were principally convicts who had served their sentences, or part of them, in the island, and had come over to Gippsland in cattle vessels.  Some of them lived honestly, about one hundred of them disappeared when the Commissioner of Crown Lands arrived with his black and white police, and a few of the most enterprising spirits adopted the calling of cattle stealers, for which business they found special facilities in the two special surveys.