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The Aborigines of Australia.

canoes on their fishing waters, and that they still less relished the coming among them of so large a force of a strange and powerful people as they beheld swarming on the ships. A few days afterwards, when the same fleet—the commanders of the expedition finding that Botany Bay was not a safe anchorage, and that the country in its immediate vicinity was not a desirable locality for establishing the settlement—sailed round and entered Port Jackson, the same mystical sounds of "Wara-wara" greeted the ears of the people in the squadron as they passed the numerous outstretching headlands and the beautiful retreating bays of the magnificent harbour, now for the first time explored by civilized men. Subsequently, when the Europeans came to have intercourse with the aborigines, and acquired something of their dialects, it was found that these words with which the colonists were first greeted in their new home meant simply "Go away! go away!" And well might the original inhabitants of these delightful localities exclaim to the intruders "Go away!" for there can be little doubt that whatever of felicity the simple nature and uncultivated ways of the New Hollander permitted him to enjoy was here possessed by him to the fullest extent. That peninsula on which the city at present stands, almost encircled by Cook's River on one side, and by the waters of the bay now known as Long Cove on the other, must have been in those days a land teeming with milk and honey for the tribes by which it was possessed. In those silent,