The great white pelican stood on one leg on a sand-bank, gazing along its huge beak at the receding tide, hour after hour, solemn and solitary, meditating on the mysteries of Nature.

But on the mountains both birds and beasts were scarce, as many a famishing white man has found to his sorrow.  In the heat of summer the sea-breeze grows faint, and dies before it reaches the ranges.  Long ropes of bark, curled with the hot sun, hang motionless from the black-butts and blue gums; a few birds may be seen sitting on the limbs of the trees, with their wings extended, their beaks open, panting for breath, unable to utter a sound from their parched throats.

“When all food fails then welcome haws” is a saying that does not apply to Australia, which yields no haws or fruit of any kind that can long sustain life.  A starving man may try to allay the pangs of hunger with the wild raspberries, or with the cherries which wear their seeds outside, but the longer he eats them, the more hungry he grows.  One resource of the lost white man, if he has a gun and ammunition, is the native bear, sometimes called monkey bear.  Its flesh is strong and muscular, and its eucalyptic odour is stronger still.  A dog will eat opossum with pleasure, but he must be very hungry before he will eat bear; and how lost to all delicacy of taste, and sense of refinement, must the epicure be who will make the attempt!  The last quadruped on which a meal can be made is the dingo, and the last winged creature is the owl, whose scanty flesh is viler even than that of the hawk or carrion crow, and yet a white man has partaken of all these and survived.  Some men have tried roasted snake, but I never heard of anyone who could keep it on his stomach.  The blacks, with their keen scent, knew when a snake was near by the odour it emitted, but they avoided the reptile whether alive or dead.

Before any white man had made his abode in Gippsland, a schooner sailed from Sydney chartered by a new settler who had taken up a station in the Port Phillip district.  His wife and family were on board, and he had shipped a large quantity of stores, suitable for commencing life in a new land.  It was afterwards remembered that the deck of the vessel was encumbered with cargo of various kinds, including a bullock dray, and that the deck hamper would unfit her to encounter bad weather.  As she did not arrive at Port Phillip within a reasonable time, a cutter was sent along the coast in search of her; and her long boat was found ashore near the Lakes Entrance, but nothing else belonging to her was ever seen.

When the report arose in 1843 that a white woman had been seen with the blacks, it was supposed that she was one of the passengers of the missing schooner, and parties of horsemen went out to search for her among the natives, but the only white woman ever found was a wooden one—­the figure-head of a ship.