Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/600

advised that Maria Island should be selected as their home. It was pleasant to the eye and the soil was good. But there was a penal settlement already there and the Government grudged such a concession to the proscribed race. They must go to the barren and repulsive King's Island. After temporary occupation of Swan Island, and a confinement on Gun Carriage Island, during which their guards could not account for their deaths otherwise than by calling them "sulky," it was determined to make Flinders' Island their home. In Jan. 1832 the first detachment were sent thither. They instinctively shuddered when they saw it. Their fate must be told hereafter. More than 200 had been captured.

There was one family still left amongst the native wilds. Fires, distant sounds, and other signs, betokened their existence, and in 1842 they also were caught and sent to join their countrymen in exile and in death. In 1833 Sir George Arthur summed up thus his dealings with them:—

"Undoubtedly the being reduced to the necessity of driving a simple and warlike, and, as it now appears, noble-minded race from their native hunting-grounds is a measure in itself so distressing that I am willing to make almost any prudent sacrifice that may tend to compensate for the injuries that the Government is unwillingly and unavoidably the means of inflicting."

Had the first Governor of Van Diemen's Land been just, firm, and wise as Phillip, this sad elegy might not have been drawn from his successor. All the education and experience of all Arthur's predecessors had made none of them as sagacious as Robinson the bricklayer, of whom it is necessary to add that he was a pious Christian, without which qualification he would perhaps have wanted the motive for his humane exertions.

Bushranging was rife during the early part of Arthur's rule. Terrible revelations were made. One gang, escaping from Macquarie Harbour, and starving in the woods, turned eyes upon one another. Three out of eight left the rest. Four then killed one and ate him. A second and a third met a like fate. The two survivors watched one another with deadly eyes, each striving to catch the other off his guard. Exhausted nature brought sleep to one and immediate death. The wretch who killed and devoured him at last reached a friendly roof. He joined some bushrangers,