Early colonial attitudes

Newspaper articles provide telling evidence of the colonists’ attitudes toward Indigenous Australians. According to Harris, “Opinions such as the following were commonplace and newspaper editors, it would seem, happily published them:

‘Brutish, faithless, vicious, the animal being given fullest loose only approached by his next of kin the monkey… the Australian black may have a soul but, if he has, then the horse and the dog, infinitely superior in every way to the black human, cannot be denied possession of that vital spark of heavenly flame.’ ^[2]