manic eyes and taut faces are desperate for a win.
A voice screams, "Show some fucking balls, get into it!"
He's answered by the opposition's jeers.
Ticket of leave men stand beside their former gaolers
but now their hate is focused on the scene.
Then someone grabs the skinnier combatant,
yanks his head back and doses him with rum.
"My money's on a clean kill you black bastard
so take that blade and give your brother some."
Then the skinny man is shoved towards the other
and the crowd cheers as the knife is driven home.
______________________________________________________________
That most shameful, cruel, and barbarous
custom of encouraging the Black people to murder or mangle one another for the
sport of the learned,
the polite, and the refined Europeans: for the amusement and
gratification of those who are denominated Christians, has, for some time, required
a more effectual prohibition than the Letter of the Law. Last Sunday afternoon, on my way from Church homewards, I was much grieved
and distressed, to hear and to see that the public peace of the Town, and the
holy rest of the Sabbath, were most impiously violated by the blows and cries
of the Blacks, excited to uproar and outrage by the Whites who take pleasure in
the sufferings of their fellow men, and, who will propose and give a reward,
that the unoffending may be slain, or injured, merely to gratify or indulge the
diabolical passions of a base mind, yea "their feet are swift to
shed" or to cause to be shed, the "innocent blood".
The Hobart Town Gazette and Southern
Reporter, Saturday 26 December 1818
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