UNDER the provisions of an Aborigines Bill introduced in the Legislative Council of Western Australia on September 23, it is now proposed that all people of colour in Western Australia, whether full-blooded or of mixed origin, shall no longer be known as “aborigines”, “half-castes”, or “near whites”, but shall be termed “natives”. While this proposal no doubt removes what has been felt in certain circumstances to be a stigma, it perpetuates and gives official approval to a troublesome ambiguity. The Bill was introduced on behalf of the Western Australian Government by the Chief Secretary, Mr. W. H. Kitson (The Times, Sept. 24). As it stands, the proposals deal with certain matters affecting the natives to which attention was directed recently in the drastic report of a commission of inquiry criticizing native conditions and the organization and functioning of the Western Australian Government's provision for the protection of the aborigines (see NATUBB, 135, 798). A better system of control of the natives is to be introduced; and a serious attempt is to be made to grapple with the grave problem of the conditions affecting native mothers and their children; while the employment of young females will be regulated to prevent exploitation by their employers. Other matters which come under view or revision are the terms of native tenure of property and land, the prohibition of the sale of intoxicants to natives, and the delicate question of the curtailment of tribal custom and practices which are calculated to cause bodily injury or to militate against the Department's work of amelioration”. Finally, and in view of past history, perhaps most important of all, native courts are to be established for the trial of offences committed by one native against another. From the brief summary which so far has been transmitted by cable, it would appear that the Government is making a determined effort to remedy the graver defects of its system to which attention has been directed, and that in certain respects the practice of the State will be brought into line with that of the Federal Government in its relations with the aborigines of the Northern Territory.