. The extent to which it was carried was enormous.
The skin of the kangaroo sold for a few pence, was the perquisite of the
stock-keepers, and long the chief object of their daily enterprise.
Their rugs, their clothing, were composed often of these spoils, and the
pursuit did not slacken until the persecuted animal retired. Jeffery,
describing the field sports of his day (1810), tells us that flocks of
emu and kangaroo were found at short intervals, and that a cart might be
loaded with their flesh by the sport of a morning; but he remained long
enough, to observe a sensible diminution, and proposed limitations by
law to the havoc of the whites; an idea, subsequently entertained by the
_Aborigines' Committee_, which sat in 1830. The dogs, trained to hunt
the kangaroo, were at first serviceable to the natives, but they often
increased the destruction by their spontaneous ravening. It is observed
by a writer of 1827, that forty or fifty would be found within short
distances, run down by the dogs, and left to rot.

Thus the food, on which the people depended for subsistence, was
diminished, and the temptation to rob the settlers was regularly
augmented at every return. Sir George Arthur, in his letter to the
Secretary of State in 1828, notices this topic as a complaint of the
natives against the intrusion of the whites, and seems to admit its
truth; but three years after, he affirms that game was still abundant in
the districts appointed for the tribes. It is, however, to be observed,
that he wrote when the blacks, as a people, were dead; and when the high
value of labor had withdrawn many from the chase; and that he implies a
local, rather than a pervading abundance. As the natives passed through
the settled districts to the sea shore, if numerous, their requirements
would be great; but, by scattering themselves abroad, to obtain a
sufficiency, their dangers would increase, and every evening they would
muster fewer than in the morning.[11]

Among the causes of enmity, referred to by writers of every period, the
abduction of the women by sealers and others, is noticed the earliest,
and continued to the last. The sealers were, chiefly, either convicts
whose sentences had expired, or such as contrived to escape. In the
islands of the Straits, they indulged the boundless license of their
passions, blending the professions of the petty pirate and the
fisherman. A chain of rocks enabled them to rove to a considerable
distance,