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Elephants sometimes butt them down with their thick heads, by way of pastime, I suppose, for they are not usually fond of posts and wire as food. Then bandicoots and porcupines burrow under them and bring them to the ground, while kites and crows sit on the wires and weigh them down.
These nets were laid by the natives in narrow channels to catch fish, as well as in the tracks of small animals, such as rats and bandicoots, for the purpose of trapping them. There were also some pieces of glass bottle in the hut, carefully wrapped in bark and placed in a very neat basket, made in the shape of a lady's reticule.
He spent a lot of time time that Dad considered should have been employed cutting burr or digging potatoes in ear-marking bears and bandicoots, and catching goannas and letting them go without their tails, or coupled in pairs with pieces of greenhide. The paddock was full of goannas in harness and slit-eared bears. THEY belonged to Joe.
W.H.D. Le Souef has this to say in his extremely interesting and valuable book, "Wild Life in Australia," page 146: "We found that foxes were unfortunately plentiful in this district, and in a hollow log that served to shelter some cubs were noticed the remains of ducks, fowls, rabbits, lambs, bandicoots and snakes; so they evidently vary their fare, snakes even not coming amiss.
After breakfast, Wylie said he thought he could catch some bandicoots, by firing the scrub near the sand-hills, and went out for an hour or two to try, but came back as he went. During his absence, I was employed in repairing my only two pair of socks now left, which were sadly dilapidated, but of which I was obliged to be very careful, as they were the only security I had against getting lame.
We then rode up to the camp, and found their dinner ready, consisting of two eggs of the brush turkey, roasted opossums, bandicoots, and iguanas. Good opossum cloaks, kangaroo nets, and dillis neatly worked of koorajong bark, were strewed about; there were also some spears, made of the Bricklow Acacia: all were forgotten in the suddenness of their retreat.
It is, indeed, somewhat to be regretted that the small part of the Australian coast which was genuinely their own discovery, should not have been in a more interesting region than was actually the case; for the true "Terre Napoleon" is no better for the most part than a sterile waste, with a back country of sand, swamp, and mallee scrub, populated principally by rabbits, dingoes, and bandicoots.
How curious it is, to give a subordinate though striking instance, that the hind feet of the kangaroo, which are so well fitted for bounding over the open plains those of the climbing, leaf-eating koala, equally well fitted for grasping the branches of trees those of the ground-dwelling, insect or root-eating, bandicoots and those of some other Australian marsupials should all be constructed on the same extraordinary type, namely with the bones of the second and third digits extremely slender and enveloped within the same skin, so that they appear like a single toe furnished with two claws.
Upon every hand there were rustlings and whisperings, tiny footfalls and scufflings among dead leaves and twigs; and here and there, as the great grey, shadowy Wolfhound swept along between the white tree-trunks, he had glimpses of rabbits, bandicoots, kangaroo-rats, and many of the lesser marsupials, all busy about their different night affairs, all half-paralysed by amazement at his passage through their midst.
For the first two days they got only two small bandicoots and found no water; they then turned back, and obtaining a little water in a hollow of the cliffs, left by the shower which had passed over, they halted under them to fish, and speared a sting-ray; this they had feasted on yesterday, and to-day came from the cliffs to look for us without any thing to eat at all.
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