a milky or creamy description.  Fine salt bush and portulac being abundant in the vicinity, we camped here at 4.30 A.M.  When we started in the evening, a strong breeze had already sprung up in the south, which conveyed much of the characteristic feeling of a hot wind.  It increased gradually to a force of five and six, but by eleven o’clock had become decidedly cool, and was so chilly towards morning that we found it necessary to throw on our ponchos.  A few cirrocumulus clouds were coming up from the east when we started, but we left them behind, and nothing was visible during the night but a thin hazy veil.  The gale continued throughout the 26th, becoming warmer as the day advanced.  In the afternoon it blew furiously, raising a good deal of dust.  The temperature of air at four P.M. was 84 degrees in the shade.  Wind trees all day.

. . .

This last entry contains an unpleasant record of poor Gray’s delinquency.  He appears to have been hitherto rather a favourite with my son.

King, on his examination before the Royal Commission, finding that Mr. Burke was censured for chastising Gray, at first denied it strongly.  My son only relates in his diary what Mr. Burke had told him; “I have given Gray a good thrashing, and well he deserved it.”  King blamed my son for mentioning this, but admitted that Mr. Burke gave Gray several slaps on the head; afterwards, seeing that Mr. Burke was found fault with for not keeping a journal, King was made to appear to say that Mr. Wills’s journal was written in conjunction with and under the supervision of Mr. Burke; and thus accounted for the absence of one by Mr. Burke.  I was present at King’s examination, and can bear witness that he said nothing of the kind.  His answers, as given in the Royal Commission Report, were framed to suit the questions of the interrogator, which appeared to astonish King, and he made no reply.  King’s statements, as far as he understood what he was asked, I believe to have been generally very truthful, and honestly given.

After March 25th, an interval of three days occurs, in which nothing is noted.  Gray’s illness, attending to the maps, with extra labour, may account for this omission.

. . .

March 29.—­Camels’ last feast; fine green feed at this camp:  plenty of vines and young polygonums on the small billibongs.

March 30.—­Boocha’s rest.—­Poor Boocha was killed; employed all day in cutting up and jerking him:  the day turned out as favourable for us as we could have wished, and a considerable portion of the meat was completely jerked before sunset.

March 31.—­Mia Mia Camp.—­Plenty of good dry feed; various shrubs; salt bushes, including cotton bush and some coarse kangaroo grass; water in the hollows on the stony pavement.  The neighbouring country chiefly composed of stony rises and sand ridges.

April 5—­Oil Camp.—­Earthy and clayey plains, generally sound and tolerably grassed, but in other places bare salt bush, and withered.