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Being much recovered, I took both Blackfellows with me, and again passed the defile east of Roper's and Scott's Peaks, and followed the watercourse rising from it to the northward. About two or three miles lower down, we found water in deep rocky basins in the bed of the creek. The rock was sandstone, fissured from south-west to north-east.
They discovered a lake of fresh water, surrounded with good country; and the natives told them of other lakes to the north-west; also 'introducing descriptions of strange animals, whose appearance could have only been equalled by that of the JIMBRA, or apes, of Western Australia, which ruthless animals, according to blackfellows' legend, devoured the survivors of Leichhardt's party, as they straggled into the confines of that colony.
The only house between Dandenong and Melbourne was once called the South Yarra Pound, kept by Mrs. Atkinson. It was near Caulfield, on the Melbourne side of "No-good-damper swamp." Some blackfellows had been poisoned there by a settler who wanted to get rid of them. He gave them a damper with arsenic in it, and when dying they said, "No good, damper."
We went westerly down the creek, and saw lots of blackfellows, but Mr. Burke did not care to try and make friends with them; he said there were too many of them, and it was no good wasting time.
This tribe gloried in the name of Myall, which the natives nearer to the colony apply in terror and abhorrence to the wild blackfellows, to whom they usually attribute the most savage propensities. Not a word could this chief of the Myalls speak besides his own language; and his slow and formal approach indicated that it was undoubtedly the first occasion on which he had seen white men.
Giles says in his journal that they were a "drilled and perfectly organized force," if so, they must have been a higher class of natives than the usual type of blackfellows, whose proceedings, as a rule, have little organization about them.
These thunder-storms are generally very local, belonging to distant valleys and ranges. Much rain had fallen at the foot of the range, but we had very little of it. Several of my companions suffered by eating too much of the cabbage-palm. The Blackfellows will doubtless wonder why so many noble trees had been felled here.
But many of the settlers had scruples about shooting blackfellows except in self-defence, and it could hardly be called self-defence to shoot one or more of the natives because a beast had been speared by some person or persons unknown. John Campbell, at Glencoe, tried a dog, a savage deerhound, which he trained to chase the human game.
This event, fortunately not a very disastrous one, was so far useful, as it impressed every one with the necessity of being watchful, even when the Blackfellows were not suspected to be near. The latitude of our camp was 24 degrees 54 minutes 19 seconds, and about seven miles from our last camp.
As we were sitting at our dinner, a fine half-grown emu walked slowly up to us, as if curious to know what business we had in its lonely haunts; unfortunately for us, the bark of our little terrier frightened it; and, although one of my Blackfellows shot after it, it retired unscathed into the neighbouring thicket. Mr. Roper killed a Rallus, which Mr. Gilbert thought to be new.
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