This little book is all about the children of wild Australia—where they came from, how they live, the weapons they fight with, their strange ideas and peculiar customs. But first of all you ought to know something of the country in which they live, whence and how they first came to it, and what we mean by "wild Australia" to-day, for it is not all "wild"—very, very far from that.

Australia is a very big country, nearly as large again as India, and no less than sixty times the size of England without Wales. Nearly half of it lies within the tropics so that in summer it is extremely hot. There are fewer white people than there are in London, in fact less than five millions in all and more than a third of these live in the five big cities which you will find around the coast, and about a third more in smaller towns not so very far from the sea. The further you travel from the coast the more scattered does the white population become, till some hundred miles inland or more you reach the sheep and cattle country where the homes of the white men are twenty or even more miles apart. Further back still lies a vast, and, as far as whites are concerned, almost unpeopled region into which, however, the squatter is constantly pushing in search of new pastures for his flocks and herds, and into which the prospector goes further and further on the look-out for gold. This country we call in Australia "the Never-Never Land," and it is this which is wild Australia to-day. It lies mostly in the North and runs right up to the great central desert. It is there that the aboriginals, or black people, are found. The actual number of these black people cannot be exactly ascertained, but there are probably not more than 100,000 of them left to-day.

Much of wild Australia is made up of vast treeless plains and huge tracts of spinifex (a coarse native grass) and sand. Sometimes in the North-west one travels miles and miles without seeing a tree except on the river banks, but in Queensland there is sometimes dense and almost impenetrable jungle, and mighty, towering trees, with many beautiful flowering shrubs. All alike is called "bush," which is the general term in Australia for all that is not town.

The animals of wild Australia are most interesting and numerous. Several kinds of kangaroo (from the giant "old man," five feet or more in height, to the tiny little kangaroo mice no larger than our own mice at home), make their home there, and emus may often be seen running across the plains. Gorgeous parrots and many varieties of cockatoos are found in great numbers, snakes are numerous, whilst the rivers and water-holes teem with fish. Wild dogs, or dingos, too, are very numerous.

HUNTING PARROTS AND COCKATOOS

For hundreds and hundreds of years the aborigines had this vast country to themselves, for though Spaniards, like Torres and De Quiros, and Dutchmen, like Tasman and Dirk Hartog, had visited their shores, and an Englishman named William Dampier had even landed in the North West in 1688, it was not till exactly a hundred years afterwards that white men first came to make their homes in their land.

The aborigines are a Dravidian people, and, some think, of the same parent stock as ourselves. Thousands of years ago, long, long before our remote ancestors had learned how to build houses, make pottery, till the soil, or domesticate any animal except the dog—long years, in fact, before history began, the aboriginals left their primitive home on the hills of the Deccan and drifting southward in their bark canoes landed at last on the northern and western shores of the great island continent. There they found an earlier people with darker skins than their own and curly hair, very much like the Papuans and Melanesians of to-day, and they drove them further and further southwards before them just as our own English forefathers, coming to this land, drove an earlier people before them into the mountain fastnesses of Wales and Cumberland and into Cornwall. Some time afterwards came a series of earthquakes and other disturbances which cut Tasmania away from the mainland, and there till 1878 that early Papuan people survived.

As the blacks grew more numerous they began to form tribes, and to divide the country up among themselves. Thus each tribe had its own hunting-ground to which it must keep and on which no other tribe must come and settle. But at length the white men came and they recognized no such law. They settled down and began to build their own homes upon the black men's hunting-grounds and to bring in their sheep and cattle and turn them loose on the plains. The blacks did not at all like the white man's coming, and sometimes did all they could to prevent their settling down. They speared their sheep and cattle for food, they burned down their houses, they threw their spears at the men themselves, and did all they could to drive them back to sea. Sometimes hundreds of them would surround a new settler's home, and murder all the whites they could see. We must not blame the blacks. They were only doing what we should do ourselves if some invader came and settled in our country and tried to drive us back. But the white men were not to be driven back. They armed themselves and made open war upon the black people and I am afraid did many things of which we are all now thoroughly ashamed. For a few years the struggle between the two races went on and at length the blacks had to own themselves beaten, and so Australia passed into the white man's hands.

The blacks to-day may be divided into three classes:—

1. The Mialls, or wild blacks, still living their own natural life in their great hunting-grounds in the North, just as they lived before the white men came. It is chiefly about these that this little book will tell.

2. The station-blacks, living on the sheep and cattle stations and helping the squatters on their "runs." They are fed and clothed in return for their work, and are given a new blanket every year. The men and boys ride about the run looking after the sheep, bring them in at shearing time and help with the shearing. The women and girls learn to do housework and make themselves useful in many ways. They seem very happy and comfortable and are usually well treated and well cared for by their masters. Once or twice a year, perhaps, they are given a "pink-eye," or holiday, and then away they go into the wild bush with their boomerangs and their spears, or perhaps visit some neighbouring camp further up or down the river's bank. Their houses are just "humpies," made of a few boughs, plastered over with clay or mud, with perhaps a piece or two of corrugated iron put up on the weather side. In this class, too, we ought to include those blacks, some hundreds, alas! in number, who spend their time "loafing about" the mining camps and the coastal towns of the North, living as best they can, guilty often of crime, learning to drink, and swear, and gamble, and often making themselves a thorough nuisance to all around. More wretched, degraded beings it would not be possible to see—such a contrast to the fine, manly wild-blacks. The pity and the shame of it all is that it is the white man who has made them what they are.

3. The mission-blacks, that is the blacks on the mission stations such as Yarrabah, Mitchell River, and Beagle Bay. These will have some chapters to themselves later on and you will, I hope, be much interested in them. There are not very many of them, perhaps not more than six or seven hundred in all, but new mission stations are being started and so we may well hope that their number will soon increase. There are some splendid Christians among them, some of them quite an example to ourselves. Of those you shall hear more fully by and by.

As you read this little book your heart will be stirred sometimes with strange feelings that you cannot quite understand. Those strange feelings will be nothing less than the expression of your own brotherhood with them. Their skins may be "black" (though they are not really black at all), and their lives may be wild; but they have human hearts beating within them just as we have, and immortal souls, like ours, for which Christ died. Never forget this as you are reading. It is so easy to forget—to claim brotherhood with those who are wiser and greater than ourselves, and to forget that just that same brotherhood unites us one by one with the countless thousands who make up what we call the wild and primitive peoples of the world.