In April, 1843, or only six and a half years after South Australia had first been occupied, the Protector of the Aborigines in Adelaide ascertained that the tribes, properly belonging to that neighbourhood, consisted of 150 individuals, in the following proportions, namely, 70 men, 39 women, and 41 children.  Now, at the Murray, among a large number of natives who, until 1842, were comparatively isolated from Europeans, and among whom are frequently many different tribes, I found by an accurate muster every month at Moorunde for a period of three years, that the women, on an average, were equally numerous with the men, from which I infer that such is usually the case in their original and natural state.  Taking this for granted, and comparing it with the proportions of the Adelaide tribe, as given above, we shall find that in six years and a half the females had diminished from an equality with the males, to from 70 to 80 per cent. less, and of course the tribe must have sustained also a corresponding diminution with respect to children.

[Note 105:  This result seems to be generally borne out by the few accurate returns that have hitherto been made on the subject.  In Mr. Protector Parker’s report for his district, to the north-west of Port Phillip (for January, 1843), that gentleman gives a census of 375 male natives, and 295 female, which gives an excess of about 26 per cent. of males over females.  In 1834 Mr. Commissioner Lambie gives a census, for the district of Manero, of 416 males and 321 females, or an excess of the former over the latter of nearly 45 per cent.  It would appear that the disproportion of the sexes increases in a ratio corresponding to the length of time a district has been occupied by settlers and their stock, and to the density of the European population residing in it.  Official returns for four divisions of the Colony of New South Wales, give a decrease of the proportion of females to males of fifteen per cent. in two years.  Vide Aborigines Protection Society Report, July, 1839, p. 69.  In the same Report, p. 70, Mr. Threlkeld states, that the Official Report for one district gives only two women to 28 men, two boys, and no girls.]

Again, in 1844, the Protector ascertained from the records he had kept that, in the same tribe, there were, in four years, twenty-seven births and fifty deaths, which shews, beyond all doubt, the gradual but certain destruction that was going on among the tribe.  If no means can be adopted to check the evil, it must eventually lead to their total extermination.

By comparing the twenty-seven births in four years with the number of women, thirty-nine, it appears that there would be annually only one child born among every six women:  a result as unnatural as it is evidently attributable to the increased prostitution that has taken place, with regard both to Europeans and other native tribes, whom curiosity has attracted to the town, but whom the Adelaide tribe were not in the habit of meeting at all, or, at least, not in such familiar intercourse prior to the arrival of the white people.  This single cause, with the diseases and miseries which it entails upon the Aborigines, is quite sufficient to account for the paucity of births, and the additional number of deaths that now occur among them.