Henry Melville

Henry Saxelby Melville Wintle (1799 – 22 December 1873), commonly referred to as Henry Melville, was an Australian journalist, author, occultist, and Freemason best remembered for writing the play The Bushrangers, his historical work The History of Van Diemen's Land from the Year 1824 to 1835, and his occult philosophical work Veritas: Revelation of Mysteries, Biblical, Historical, and Social by Means of the Median and Persian Laws. His life was dramatized in the 1882 Princess Theatre (Bendigo) production Found, or Found Drowned.

Quotes

• In this year [1824] the aborigines of the Island began to annoy the settlers to a degree that required some active measures of the Government to allay the outraged feelings of this ill-fated race of human beings. These poor bewildered creatures had been treated worse than were any of the American tribes by the Spaniards. Easy, quiet, good-natured, and well-disposed towards the white population, they could no longer brook the treatment they received from the invaders of their country. Their hunting grounds were taken from them, and they themselves were driven like trespassers from the favorite spots for which their ancestors had bled, and had claimed by conquest. The various tribes which formerly were at war with each other, about this time seemed to forget their private differences, and their great aim was to protect themselves from slaughter, and to be revenged! The stock-keepers may be considered as the destroyers of nearly the whole of the aborigines—the proper, the legitimate owners of the soil: these miscreants so imposed upon their docility, that at length they thought little or nothing of destroying the men for the sake of carrying to their huts the females of the tribes; and, if it were possible in a work like this to record but a tithe of the murders committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader's blood run cold at the bare recital. In self-defence were these poor harmless creatures driven to desperate means, their fine kangaroo grounds were taken from them, and thus were they in want of their customary food; and when every other means of obtaining a livelihood was debarred to them, necessity compelled them to seek food of their despoilers.
  • The History of the Island of Van Diemen's Land (London and Hobart, 1835), p. 23

• They proceeded, not with the sword, but with the olive branch.
  • The History of the Island of Van Diemen's Land, p. 121, of John Batman's roving party against the aborigines; cf. Garry Linnell, Buckley's Chance (2019), p. 174

See also

• Kikatapula
• Musquito

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Henry Melville on Wikipedia