Blacks possess acquirements which white people cannot successfully imitate, are industrious in fashioning weapons and in the invention and practice of primitive forms of amusement, and are in many respects entertaining subjects to those who apply themselves, though superficially, to the study of their habits and customs.  On the impulse of the moment they are generous or cruel, erratic, purposeless, unstable as water.

The cat’s cradle of childhood’s days, in the hands of a black who has practised the pastime, becomes most elaborate.  He makes complicated designs never dreamt of by the whites—­fish, palm-trees, turtles, snakes, birds flying, men and women, etc. etc., the variety being endless.  Toy darts and toy boomerangs are common, and the system of signalling by gesture comprehensive and excellent.  The Queensland Government has taken means for the preservation of knowledge of many of the sports and pastimes, as well as the language and habits of the blacks, being impressed with the urgency of so doing by the rapid decrease in their numbers.  Many have been hastened from the world by a new and seductive vice.  Chinese cultivators of bananas found the blacks useful, and rewarded them with the ashes from their opium-pipes.  Mixed with water the dregs form a warm and comforting beverage, but its effects were terrible.  The fiery liquors of mean whites, and diseases contracted from the depraved, killed off many of the original lords of the soil.  Opium was supplying the finishing touches when the Australian Federal Government, by an act of conscious virtue, forbade its introduction to the Commonwealth, save for use as a drug.  Indirectly the blacks have been saved from demoralisation which threatened to become precipitate—­that is to say, in those localities where the smuggling of opium has been suppressed.

The dwindling away of the race is, however, inevitable.  A few anecdotes may perhaps throw unaccustomed light upon attributes not generally understood, and show that the Australian aboriginal, uncouth savage as he is, is not altogether devoid of smartness and good-humour.

COMMON AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Australian blacks have been referred to as socialists, and even communists.  Certainly they repudiate thrift, and may therefore be said to side with some socialists, and their camp customs embody communistic principles.  The cunningness and zeal with which they enforce individual rights in property may be cited in connection with a food tree.  When a neighbouring estate was first settled, in the jungle on the site selected for the house were several magnificent bean-trees.  One was about to be felled, when an old man, chief of the camp close by, made it known through an interpreter that food-bearing trees were not to be cut down.  Eventually a bargain was struck, the whole of the trees on the spot being purchased from the old man, the pioneers being glad of the opportunity