Page:The aborigines of Australia.djvu/148

This page has been validated.
THE TANTGORT TRIBE.
135

honour to report that, on the afternoon of the 24th, two aboriginal natives, whose names I transmit, returned to this encampment, which they had left with their families on the 22nd, and reported that late on the previous evening, while they, with their wives, two other females, and two children were asleep at a ti-tree scrub called One-one-derang, a party of eight white people, on horseback, surrounded them, dismounted, and fired upon them with pistols. That three women and a child had been thus killed, and the other female so severely wounded as to be unable to stand, or to be removed by them. They had saved themselves and the child named Unibicquiang by flight, who was brought to this place upon their shoulders." The report proceeds to state that on the following morning the writer proceeded to the spot indicated, and found the dead bodies of three women and a child killed by gun-shot, and a fourth woman dangerously wounded, as described by the men. In the report of another Assistant-Protector, Mr. Parker, the names of 43 aboriginals murdered by whites in one of the northern districts, from 1838 till 1841, were given. The superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission to the aborigines, the Rev. Mr. Hirst, writes:—"There is something peculiar in the case of the Tantgort tribe. Two years ago this tribe was a numerous one, but nearly the whole of the fighting men have been butchered in cold blood by Europeans, so that they are so far reduced as to be unable to defend themselves against the inroads of the neigh