103 at end of para.] There, instead of a few districts, the whole island is depopulated of its original inhabitants, and only thirty or forty individuals, the banished remnant of a once numerous people, are now existing as exiles at Flinders Island, to tell the tale of their expatriation. [Note 104 at end of para.] In Western Australia the same process is gradually but certainly going on among the tribes most in contact with the Europeans.  In South Australia it is the same; and short as is the time that this province has been occupied as a British Colony, the results upon the Aborigines are but too apparent in their diminished numbers, in the great disproportion that has been produced between the sexes, and in the large preponderance of deaths over births.  A miserably diseased condition, and the almost total absence of children, are immediate consequences of this contact with Europeans.  The increase or diminution of the tribes can only be ascertained exactly in the different districts, by their being regularly mustered, and lists kept of the numbers and proportion of the sexes, births, deaths, etc.

[Note 102:  “Hard indeed is the fate of the children of the soil, and one of the darkest enigmas of life lies in the degradation and decay wrought by the very civilization which should succour, teach, and improve.”—­Athenaeum.]

[Note 103:  “That the Aboriginal Tasmanian was naturally mild and inoffensive in disposition, appears to be beyond doubt.  A worm, however, will turn, and the atrocities which were perpetrated against these unoffending creatures may well palliate the indiscriminate, though heart-rending slaughter they entailed.  Such was the character of the Tasmanian native before roused by oppression, and ere a continued and systematic hostility had arisen between the races—­ere ’their hand was against every man, and every man’s hand against them.’” —­MARTYN’S colonial Magazine, May, 1840.]

[Note 104:  “At the epoch of their deportation, in 1835, the number of the natives amounted to 210.  Visited by me in 1842, that is, after the interval of seven years, they mustered only fifty-four individuals.”  —­Strzelecki’s new south Wales, p. 352

Respecting the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, who were thus forcibly removed, Mr. Chief Protector Robinson (who removed them) observes (Parliamentary Report, p. 198), “When the natives were all assembled at Flinders Island, in 1835, I took charge of them, and have continued to do so ever since.  I did not find them retaining that ferocious character which they displayed in their own country; they shewed no hostility, nor even hostile recollection towards the whites.  Unquestionably these natives assembled on the island were the same who had been engaged in the outrages I have spoken of; many of them, before they were removed, pointed out to me the spots where murders and other acts of violence had been committed; they made no secret of acknowledging their participation in such acts, and only considered them a just retaliation for wrongs done to them or their progenitors.  On removal to the island they appeared to forget all these facts; they could not of course fail to remember them, but they never recurred to them.”]