RESOLVE TO AVOID THE NATIVES.

August 5.

As the last journey had been a long one and we had some rough ground before us, we rested a day here while the blacksmith repaired one of the cartwheels.  The calls of the natives were heard very early in the morning, and two fellows came to our men on the river, impudently demanding tomahawks; but little attention was paid to them, and they did not visit the camp.  We had no longer any desire to communicate with the aborigines, for we had too long in vain held out to them the olive branch and made them presents; and as we could not hope to gain their friendship we were resolved to brook no longer the sight of their burning brands and other gestures of hostility; still less were we inclined to give tomahawks on demand, since our presents had not been received with that sense of obligation which might have been shown by any class of human beings, however savage.  I therefore now determined to avoid the natives wherever I could and, if they came near the party, to encourage their approach as little as possible.

THEIR HABITS.

August 6.

We continued along our old route, but at about seven miles we cut off a considerable angle in that point of it where we formerly saw the Puppy tribe, and were thus enabled to pass two miles beyond our former ground, and to pitch our tents near the river.  At this encampment we perceived smoke arising from the same native bivouac which I visited in my journey on horseback before the party left Fort Bourke.  From this smoke and other circumstances it would appear that some of the tribes on the Darling are not migratory, but remain, in part at least, the gins and children possibly, at some particular portion of the river.  This seems probable too, considering how much better they must thus become acquainted with the haunts of the fishes which are here their chief food.  The ground we now occupied was upon the whole the best piece of country, in point of soil, that I had seen upon the Darling.  Dunlop’s range was just behind, an extremity of it extending to the river, at three miles west from our camp.  Three miles further eastward our old route was crossed by a hollow which appeared to be the outlet of an extensive watercourse coming from the south-east, along the base of Dunlop’s range, or the low country between it and D’Urban’s group.  We had scarcely started this morning when the dogs killed another emu, and in the course of the day we passed and recognised the spot where our first emu was killed.  Thus in one day on our outward journey we had traversed the country in which all the emus we had ever killed on the Darling, three in number, had been found.

The hill which we crossed in our route consisted of a different sort of rock from any of those that we had seen further down the Darling, being a splintery quartz in which the grains of sand or quartz are firmly embedded in the siliceous cement.

HINTS TO AUSTRALIAN SPORTSMEN.