Obituaries Australia

On Thursday a Coroner's Inquest assembled at Hawkesbury on the body of William Yardley, a settler down the River, whose death was occasioned by the following melancholy circumstances: A considerable time after himself and family were in bed Wednesday night, the house took fire, and burned with such rapidity as to render their escape difficult: he succeeded nevertheless, with his wife's assistance, in snatching his children from the flames, and then unhappily returned to save some little clothing, but the roof falling in, he perished in the attempt. The body of the deceased presented a ghastly spectacle to the jurors, whose verdict was appropriate to the event. As the accident of the house taking fire was most unaccountable and mysterious, many people attributed it to the lightning, which was very vivid at the time; but it is a much more probable conjecture that the disaster originated in the rancour of the Branch natives, to whose excesses his activity was a constant curb, and whose hostile inclinations are as manifest as ever. So long as they content themselves with pillaging the settlers' grounds they experience civility and hospitable treatment: but tiring with this comparative moderation, they rush into acts of open and declared hostility; and it is much to be lamented that possibly from the want of sufficient caution, the first objects of their treachery have too frequently become its easy victims.