e colony where cattle run.
The intrusion therefore of cattle is by itself sufficient to produce the
extirpation of the native race, by limiting their means of existence; and
this must work such extensive changes in Australia as never entered into
the contemplation of the local authorities. The squatters, it is true,
have also been obliged to burn the old grass occasionally on their runs;
but so little has this been understood by the Imperial Government that an
order against the burning of the grass was once sent out, on the
representations of a traveller in the south. The omission of the annual
periodical burning by natives, of the grass and young saplings, has
already produced in the open forest lands nearest to Sydney, thick
forests of young trees, where, formerly, a man might gallop without
impediment, and see whole miles before him. Kangaroos are no longer to be
seen there; the grass is choked by underwood; neither are there natives
to burn the grass, nor is fire longer desirable there amongst the fences
of the settler. The occupation of the territory by the white race seems
thus to involve, as an inevitable result, the extirpation of the
aborigines; and it may well be pleaded, in extenuation of any adverse
feelings these may show towards the white men, that these consequences,
although so little considered by the intruders, must be obvious to the
natives, with their usual acuteness, as soon as cattle enter on their
territory. The foregoing journal affords instances of the habits of the
natives in these respects. Silently, but surely, that extirpation of
aborigines is going forward in grazing districts, even where protectors
of aborigines have been most active; and in Van Diemen's Land, the race
has been extirpated, even before that of the kangaroos, under an agency
still more destructive.

It would be but natural, even admitting these aboriginal inhabitants to
be, as men, "only a little lower than the angels," that they should feel
disposed, when urged by hunger, to help themselves to some of the cattle
or sheep that had fattened on the green pastures kept clear for kangaroos
from time immemorial by the fires of the natives and their forefathers;
but such cases have been, nevertheless, of rare occurrence, partly
because much human life has been sacrificed to the manes of sheep or
cattle. No orders of the local government can prevent the perpetration of
these atrocities. Government Orders have been put forth in forma