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Port Mackay is a district of Queensland, Australia, best known for its production of cane sugar. It was first settled in the 1860s, when John Mackay (1839–1914) successfully completed a mission to claim farmland and introduce agriculture there. First published in 1908, this study by the businessman and keen amateur anthropologist Henry Ling Roth (1855–1925) explores the district's history, tracing its development from an uncharted territory barely noticed by early European explorers to a burgeoning community that profited from its ideal conditions for cultivation. Drawing on extensive notes from his visits to the region over thirty years, as well as some fascinating anecdotal accounts from settlers, Roth explores the achievements of Port Mackay's early colonists in agriculture, industry and sea trading. The book contains maps and photographs, and includes a short account of the local Aboriginal population, and substantial notes on natural history and sporting pursuits.
First published in 1890 in a run of just 200 copies, anthropologist Henry Ling Roth's The Aborigines of Tasmania provides a comprehensive account of native Tasmanians' life and culture. Roth, writing in the wake of the Tasmanian Aborigines' extinction, produces 'an approach to absolute completeness' that relies on the accounts of the explorers, colonisers, and anthropologists who preceded him. His work covers an exhaustive range of detail, from the Tasmanians' mannerisms to their psychology, origin, and language. Compiling his predecessors' observations and arguments, Roth often sets opinions in opposition to highlight the lack of consensus amongst those who encountered the Tasmanians. Roth's book is additionally valuable for the 'vocabularies' included in his appendices. The 1899 edition (225 copies) revises and expands the first, adding photographs to the first edition's illustrations as well as new appendices. It made an innovative and lasting contribution to an established research tradition.
“I HAVE no reason (says Davies, p. 412) to suppose that infanticide existed amongst the aborigines in their former wild state; there is little doubt, however, but that it was common of later years, driven to it, as they in all probability were, by the continued harassing of the whites, … dogs became so extremely valuable to them, that the females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies.” Laplace's words are very similar (II. ch. xviii. pp. 201-202): “The women are only too happy if … the little beings, who owe to them their birth, are not snatched from their arms; for, in the times of dearth, to which, through a too dry or too wet year, these savages, who are completely destitute of foresight, are exposed, it frequently happens that the children are abandoned in the middle of the woods, because their father dreads hunger, or prefers to keep the dog which aids him in hunting down the game.” Chas. Meredith (pp. 201-202) attributes infanticide to somewhat different causes: “The disappearance of all the young children among the natives compels us to the inference that they were destroyed, doubtless on account of the difficulty of conveying them about in the rapid flights from place to place which the blacks now practised in the perpetration of their murders.