Let us pause for a moment and consider. Miago when he was landed had amongst the white people none who would be truly friends of his; they would give him scraps from their table, but the very outcasts of the whites would not have treated him as an equal; they had no sympathy with him; he could not have married a white woman, he had no certain means of subsistence open to him, he never could have been either a husband or a father if he had lived apart from his own people. Where amongst the whites was he to find one who would have filled for him the place of his black mother, whom he is much attached to? What white man would have been his brother? What white woman his sister? He had two courses open to him: he could either have renounced all natural ties and have led a hopeless, joyless life amongst the whites, ever a servant, ever an inferior being: or he could renounce civilization and return to the friends of his childhood and to the habits of his youth. He chose the latter course, and I think that I should have done the same.[1]
The absolute submission of the individual to the will of the tribe left Miago no other course. But those who imputed to him inborn, untameable savagery have been confuted by the result in every case in which the black child has by accident been taken from the tribe before it had been able to learn the language and traditions of the people.
An infant whose parents were shot at Toongabbe in the last century, another who was permitted at the Hunter River to be suckled by a white woman whose child had died, and who when the foster-child grew would not part with it to its mother; these and many similar instances proved that it was the hold of native language and tradition which was too powerful to be broken. The two instances cited were accompanied by a feeling of repugnance to being deemed members of the race which was daily, by ravages of drink and disease, undergoing degradation before the eyes of the changelings.
Mr. Eyre says—
"The character of the Australian natives is frank, open, and confiding.In a short intercourse they are easily made friends, and when such terms are once established, they associate with strangers with a freedom and fearlessness that would give little countenance to the impression so
- ↑ On the east a native (who had been sent to school and had carried off prizes amongst white boys) when he returned to the bush entered the corps of native Police, and sadly said to his commanding officer (as quoted by the good missionary Ridley), "I wish I had never been taken out of the bush and educated as I have been, for I cannot be a white man; they will never look upon me as one of themselves; and I cannot be a black fellow, for I am disgusted with their mode of living."
