gives an excess of about 26 per cent. of males over females.
In 1834 Mr. Commissioner Lambie gives a census, for the district of
Manero, of 416 males and 321 females, or an excess of the former over the
latter of nearly 45 per cent. It would appear that the disproportion of
the sexes increases in a ratio corresponding to the length of time a
district has been occupied by settlers and their stock, and to the density
of the European population residing in it. Official returns for four
divisions of the Colony of New South Wales, give a decrease of the
proportion of females to males of fifteen per cent. in two years. Vide
Aborigines Protection Society Report, July, 1839, p. 69. In the same
Report, p. 70, Mr. Threlkeld states, that the Official Report for one
district gives only two women to 28 men, two boys, and no girls.]

Again, in 1844, the Protector ascertained from the records he had kept
that, in the same tribe, there were, in four years, twenty-seven births
and FIFTY deaths, which shews, beyond all doubt, the gradual but certain
destruction that was going on among the tribe. If no means can be adopted
to check the evil, it must eventually lead to their total extermination.

By comparing the twenty-seven births in four years with the number of
women, thirty-nine, it appears that there would be annually only one
child born among every six women: a result as unnatural as it is
evidently attributable to the increased prostitution that has taken
place, with regard both to Europeans and other native tribes, whom
curiosity has attracted to the town, but whom the Adelaide tribe were not
in the habit of meeting at all, or, at least, not in such familiar
intercourse prior to the arrival of the white people. This single cause,
with the diseases and miseries which it entails upon the Aborigines, is
quite sufficient to account for the paucity of births, and the additional
number of deaths that now occur among them.

In the Moorunde statistics, given Chapter VI., the very small number of
infants compared with the number of women is still more strongly
illustrated; but in this case only those infants that lived and were
brought up by their mothers to the monthly musters were marked down; many
other births had, doubtless, taken place, where the children had died, or
been killed, but of which no notice is taken, as it would have been
impossible under the circumstances of such a mixture of tribes, and their
constantly changing their