Walter Lawrey meets the chief of a black tribe

Near Portland Head (Wisemans Ferry) on the Hawkesbury River, the Methodist missionary Walter Lawry meets the chief of ‘a tribe of blacks’, but the women take their children and run off. Lawry writes: ‘I enquired why the children were carried off; they replied that many of them had been taken away by men in black clothes, and put to school at Parramatta, and they feared I was come on that errand’. (James Colwell, Illustrated History of Methodism, Sydney: William Brooks &Co., 1904:170-71.)