killing a sheep and a kangaroo," especially if found feeding on their own hunting ground. The offences of the natives against the settlers are naturally held more in remembrance, but the crimes of the whites against the natives, which,—if fairly computed from the records of the criminal courts (and such an estimate has been made) would fully counterbalance those of the natives against them, both in number and enormity, notwithstanding that they were committed by those who, from civilization and religion, and sometimes from office and station in life, should have known and done better,—have resulted not always from provocation but were often committed without any such excuse. Moreover, the remuneration given for labor to the natives has always been very inferior to that given to white men for the same services; it has also been very uncertain and unequal; the superiority of the white race has always been asserted, often arrogantly, not unfrequently with contempt or violence. The native therefore has naturally preferred the "bush walk" and a life of independence with the means of subsistence afforded by it, to a scanty, precarious, and servile dependence on the invading race, whom, in his ignorance of their intentions and of the numbers who would follow them, he had at first welcomed to his shores, and, indeed, whom he bad imagined to be his deceased relations and friends returning in new forms from the West, to which their spirits had departed. The life of a native in West Australia, when not in the settled districts, is one of indolence broken occasionally by violent excitement, as of the chase, domestic feud or war. It is a common error to suppose that they are often wanting food, though, no doubt, in unfavorable seasons, and in the less fertile districts, they are sometimes in a state of starvation; as indeed the settlers might be but for the
