and would only court failure, efforts are concentrated on the training of the children, at first the foundlings and weaklings sent voluntarily to the mission to be cared for. The mission life with its regular food, shelter, comfort and companionship soon attracts others. As these young people grow up, and are educated—the boys trained in farming, gardening, fishing and skilled trades, and the girls in domestic accomplishments suitable to their simple station—they are encouraged to mate and settle in villages, cultivate garden plots, raise pigs, poultry and bees, help in the farming, cattle-raising and fishing, and become self-supporting. Many of the young men engage as crews in the shelling industry or work vessels of their own on the communal system.
These trained young people are the best missionaries to the old nomads. Their example induces the old people to attach themselves partially to the mission, coming in from spells of "walk-about" to earn tobacco, tomahawks or knives by casual labour or bartering bush foods for trade goods or flour. They usually display interest in the young gardeners when the food crops are ripe, and would frequently eat the produce if allowed to do so.
On some of the larger reserves, out-station villages have been started on suitable river sites in the country of some of the primitive tribes hitherto untouched, by some of the trained aboriginal couples, with considerable success. The lines followed have been those of the mother mission—education of the children, and object lessons in simple husbandry. The white missionaries visit periodically for medical treatment and religious instruction.
If further evidence is needed that the primitive aboriginal is beginning to understand and appreciate the benefits of the settled village life and productive work, especially when he can see that the fruits are for his own use, the native settlement at Cowal Creek on the extreme point of Cape York can be cited. This settlement was formed twenty years by the remnants of the old Seven Rivers and Red Island tribes entirely of their own volition, and has been developed by their own efforts to a neat, well-laid out village of bark cottages, where the 200 inhabitants maintain themselves by gardening, hunting, fishing and gathering bush foods. The only help received from the department has been gifts of tools, fencing material, a fishing-boat on time payment, and occasionally some rations when the crops have been destroyed by wild cattle and pigs. An island native, who teaches the children and acts as missionary, is paid a small salary, but the natives govern themselves with their own councillors and police, the local protector, twenty miles away by sea, visiting once or twice a year for inspection and advice.
These village police have frequently given valuable assistance in the capture of desperate native characters on the peninsula wanted for murder, wife abduction and cattle killing.
All the foregoing reserves are vested in trustees representing the department, and the controlling church bodies, thus giving some assurance of stability of tenure and conservation of native interests.
With regard to the interest displayed overseas in the question of the preservation of the aborigines in Australia, it has been of considerable interest at this juncture to receive from a private source a copy of a circular letter written by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society of London to various philanthropic bodies seeking their views on a scheme they proposed to place before the Australian governments for development of aboriginal reserves in productive industries, in trust, for the benefit of the natives.
While the society quotes the success of such trusts in other countries, the scheme is so much on all fours with the mission reserve system in Queensland as to justify the belief that the ideas in the main have come from that State's publications, especially as they quote from its annual report that £300,000 of native funds is held in trust, and suggest that this money should be borrowed and used for the furtherance of the scheme. As a matter of fact, this money amounting actually to £260,000 is the aggregate of the balances of over 6,000 individual savings bank accounts which must always be available to the owners for their benefit when required.
Although they are a different type of people from, and superior to the mainland aboriginal, being Polynesian in strain, and naturally village dwellers and horticulturists as well as fishermen, the Torres Strait tribes, whose islands have been closely reserved, afford an example of the degree to which natives can be developed to self-dependence.
These people, numbering 3,500, entirely maintain themselves with their fleet of 26 vessels working in the shelling industry, and by gardening, pig and fowl raising and fishing. They have their own trading station, financed from their own funds with several branch retail stores. The main part of the proceeds of the fleet's catch, and wages earned by the surplus men on other fleets amounting to about £26,000, passes through their own stores, the profits being devoted to their own benefit.
These islanders also govern their domestic affairs with their own councillors and police, elected by themselves, the only cost to the department being for administrative machinery, including school teachers and patrol vessel. As the result of the policy of segregation, these people although progressing in civilization, have achieved this development on improved native lines and not as poor imitation whites, for they still retain their native customs, arts, crafts and music.
The people of (b) class probably present the most difficult problem. The usurpation of their hunting grounds has resulted in destruction of their native culture and contamination from contact with the alien race. Their helpless position exposes them to temptations and vices to which they easily fall a prey, mainly because of the food poverty caused by destruction of their natural means of subsistence.
The employment of their ablebodied young people, even where such services are paid for aggravates, rather than relieves, the hardship, as few employers will accept the burden of maintaining the whole of the aged and young camp relatives of their employees.
Even where relief can he given, issues of flour, rice, tea, sugar and beef offal are inadequate substitutes for the native game and fruits of which they have been deprived.
In most places education of the children is impossible, as such benefits are unprocurable in the locality itself for the children of the employer, except at heavy expense.
The obvious and eventual solution would be to transfer all such people, to institutions where the desired care, control and education could be given, but wholesale herding of tribes to strange country cannot be done without hardship. Another factor in the problem, though it should not be
