be destroyed or driven away; the wild
plants and roots ploughed up or burnt; or, at all events, the wild
owners of that land must (however rightful, however ancient, their claim
of possession) be warned off from their own soil, and, as trespassers,
made liable to punishment according to law,--to European law.

[54] For instance, the natives on the river Bogan used the new
tomahawks, given them by Major Mitchell, in getting wild honey--a food
very commonly eaten in Australia--from the hollow branches of the trees.
It seemed as though, in the proper season, they could find it almost
everywhere. "To such inexpert clowns as they probably thought us,"
continues the Major, "the honey and the bees were inaccessible, and
indeed, invisible, save only when the natives cut the former out, and
brought it to us in little sheets of bark; thus displaying a degree of
ingenuity and skill in supplying wants, which we, with all our science,
could not hope to attain." They caught a bee, and stuck to it, with gum
or resin, some light down of a swan or owl: thus laden, the bee would
make for its nest in some lofty tree, and betray its store of
sweets.--MITCHELL'S _Three Expeditions_, vol. i. p. 173.

We are not to suppose from the wandering character of the life usually
led by them, that these human beings have no notion of property in land.
On the contrary, it is an opinion held by men best able to judge, and
supported by sufficient proof, that, not only have the various tribes
their fixed boundaries of hunting-ground, which they cannot cross
without the risk of a quarrel with their neighbours, but that even
individual persons possess property of this nature, which is handed
down, according to certain laws, from father to son. A curious example
of this strictness about property, exceeding even the ideas of Europeans
upon the subject, was found upon the banks of the river Darling, where
different tribes occupy different portions of the stream whence all
equally derive the chief part of their subsistence. One of these tribes
desired Major Mitchell's men to pour out the water which they had taken,
as if it had belonged to them, and at the same time they dug a hole in
the ground to receive it, when poured out. Nay, so strongly are the
river chiefs possessed with a notion of the water being their own, that
they have been seen, on receiving a tomahawk, to point to the stream,
signifying that the strangers were at libert