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the district. Natives domesticated at Sydney regretted the warfare near Parramatta and Toongabbe, where the natives "were irritated by an active daring leader named Pemulwy, and in the few intercourses we had with some of his companions expressed their sorrow for the part they were obliged to act by the great influence that Pemulwy had over. them." Decided measures were necessary. "From their extreme agility, lying in wait for natives was out of the question. . . . With these views (founded on the opinions of the principal officers coinciding with mine) I gave orders for every person doing their utmost to bring Pemulwy in. either dead or alive. . . The natives were told that when Pemulwy was given up they should be re-admitted to our friendship. . . ." Two settlers shot Pemulwy^[1] and another native, and the head of the "daring leader" was carried to the Governor, who ordered that the natives should no longer be molested.

The division of the natives in tribes, of which many were mutually hostile, prevented combination, and fire-arms opposed to wooden weapons would have made a general war fatal to the tribes, even if they had had a Galgacus to array them in thousands. They were forced back, not to the ocean, but to the mountains. But they could not wander freely through them. Inexorable tradition confined them within hereditary domains. They could but lurk like wolves in inaccessible places from which they emerged to take savage vengeance on a passer-by, or to add their own unburied corpses to the numbers already strewn by the modern raptores orbis who hunted them on their native soil. In June 1804 the Sydney Gazette recorded that fourteen settlers "went against the natives and fired upon them in the mountains beyond the Hawkesbury."

In July 1804 Mr. Marsden and Dr. Arndell procured a conference with two Hawkesbury chiefs, Yarragowby and Yarramandy, and urged the advantages of peace. But there was no peace. Writing (14th Aug. 1804) King said that in May and June the natives on the Lower Hawkesbury farms had been so troublesome that "the whole of the new settlers were leaving their habitations;" that he "was very