their audacious atrocities have been lamentably great, although, at
the same time, I have little hesitation in saying, they have arisen
from the cruel treatment experienced by some of their women from the
hands of the distant stock-keepers. Indeed, these poor mortals, I
know, have been shot at merely to gratify a most barbarous cruelty....

After killing a white man, the natives have a sort of dance and
rejoicing, jumping, and singing, and sending forth the strangest
noises ever heard. They do not molest the body when dead, nor have I
ever heard of their stripping or robbing the deceased. Among
themselves they have no funeral rites; and those who are aged or
diseased are left in hollow trees, or under the ledges of rocks, to
pine and die. These people are subject to a disease, which causes the
most loathsome ulcerated sores; two or three whom I saw were
wretched-looking objects. I remember a very old man, who was thus
affected, being tried and hung, for spearing one of Mr. Hart's men;
the culprit was so ill and infirm as to be obliged to be carried to
the place of execution. I think the colonial surgeons call the disease
the "bush scab;" and that it is occasioned by a filthy mode of life.
The population of natives is very small in proportion to the extent of
the island: several causes may be alleged for their smallness of
numbers; the principal one is their having been driven about from
place to place, by settlers taking new locations; another cause is the
great destruction of the kangaroo, which obliges the natives to labour
hard to procure food sufficient for their sustenance: this, and their
having no means of procuring vegetables, besides being constantly
exposed to the weather, together with their offensive habits of
living, produce the disease above mentioned, with its fatal
consequences. _Widdowson's Van Dieman's Land_.