Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/483

His notice was vain. Two whites were missing in 1810. One was thus described in the Derwent Star (Jan. 1810):—

"The natives who have been rendered desperate by the cruelties they have experienced from our people, have now begun to distress us by attacking our cattle. . . . No account having been received of William Russell and George Getley, there can be no doubt of the miserable end they have been put to. This unfortunate man, Russell, is a striking instance of divine agency which has overtaken him at last, and punished him by the hands of those very people who have suffered so much from him; he being well known to have exercised his barbarous disposition in murdering or torturing any who unfortunately came within his reach."

Colonel Davey endeavoured to win the confidence of the natives. Through the agency of a native woman living with a white man, between thirty and forty of them visited the settlement. In spite of the Governor's known desires, some worthless Europeans maltreated them, and they escaped. Davey declared that he could not have believed that British subjects would have so ignominiously stained the honour of their country and themselves, as to have acted in the manner they did toward the aborigines." Sorell swelled the sad testimony. In 1819 he reminded his subjects that the natives were "unsuspicious and peaceable, manifesting no disposition to injure" in certain remote places, "and they are known to be equally inoffensive in other places where the stock-keepers treat them with mildness and forbearance." One instance will suffice as a record of the atrocities committed. Formal inquiry^[1] established the fact that about the time of Governor Davey, a man, while capturing a native woman, killed her husband, slung the bleeding head upon her neck, and drove her thus before him to be retained by force.

From such scenes it is a relief to turn to the progress of discovery in New South Wales. When Macquarie assumed the government in 1810, the colony consisted only of the county of Cumberland, with an outpost at the mouth of the Hunter, reached by sea. Westward, the Blue Mountains, whose rugged watershed fed the Nepean, the Cox, the Grose, and other tributaries of the Hawkesbury, had