In South Australia he established one of his first schools, and the lessons obtained from it were widely useful.  They suggested the difficulties that had to be overcome, wherever the alphabet was spread before the Aborigine.  Children made bright pupils, but, as they grew up, were apt to go back on what they had learned.  The reason was not far to seek.  An educated native found himself out of touch with his uneducated fellows; education made a barrier.  He was not the equal of the Europeans, and could form no friendships with them.  Neither was he happy with his own people, whom he had passed in civilisation.  He swung between two poles, and very frequently was dragged back into the volume of native life.

‘You see the difficulty,’ Sir George pointed out, ’as one that is necessarily present with regard to all savage races.  But it has its cure, which I put into practice, namely, to provide males and females with an equally good education.  Especially, I mean a technical education, the learning of some trade or art, for that was all important.  Natives, on leaving school, could then make a living by plying among the Europeans the industry they had learned.  Should a native learn shoemaking, he could find a wife in a girl trained to domestic service.  Such a couple were not compelled to return to their own people, and they were independent of the Europeans.  It was lifting a race by its two halves, these being essential to each other, not leaving one of them behind.’

Next, a picture in black and white.  It wandered into the gallery of Sir George’s Pro-Consulship in South Australia.  At the entrance to Spencer’s Gulf lies an island, on which a fortuitous little colony had established itself.  The colonists were mostly escaped convicts, from the penal settlements of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land, or sailors who had deserted their ships.  The men killed the seals which frequented the island, trading in their skins with vessels that now and then called for the purpose.

‘I had never judged it my business,’ Sir George spoke of this matter, ’to interfere with those sealers.  They kept the peace among themselves, and did not come into contact with the settlement at Adelaide.  Indeed, they had some form of justice, under which a member who did anything wrong, was transported for a time to a smaller neighbouring island.  There he could live on oysters of a sort, and on fish caught with lines supplied to him.  It was being sent to Coventry, new style, including oysters, which, like all delicacies, will, I suppose, cause surfeit.

’The chief of this settlement, as he might be termed, had brought a native woman with him from Van Diemen’s Land.  He was fairly educated, not without considerable power of reasoning, and I had repeated talks with him.  Most of his companions had Australian black women living with them, and there was a story that these had been taken by force from the mainland.  The natives of Van Diemen’s Land were entirely distinct from the natives of Australia, and the differences have been much debated.  The hair of a Van Diemen’s Land woman was curly and woolly, Kaffir like; that of the Australian woman long and straight.