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Updated: July 29, 2025
Twenty or thirty may be peering about in a bloodwood, and with a unanimous impulse and a call in unison they slip through the forest, and shoot into the jungle, flashing sun-glints. Eager, alert, always under high pressure, the business of the moment brooks of no delay. The flocks come and go between the home and the feeding-ground with noisy exclamations and impetuous haste.
Clinging to the bark of the bloodwood, with tail spread out fan-wise as additional support, he searches every interstice, and ever and anon flies to the Moreton Bay ash, and tears off the curling fragments of crisp bark which afford concealment to the smaller beetles, grubs and spiders.
To get out of this difficult meshwork of salt-waters, I turned to the south-west, and continued in this direction until the sands, Mangrove creeks, and Salicornias, disappeared, and we were again fairly in the scrubs, which however we found more open, and frequently interspersed with bloodwood and Pandanus.
We travelled eight miles W.S.W. over a succession of plains separated by belts of forest, consisting of bloodwood, box, apple-gum, and rusty-gum. Some plains were scattered over with Bauhinias. The holes along the plains are probably filled with water during the rainy season; dead shells of Paludina were extremely numerous, and we found even the shield of a turtle in one of them.
It came from W.S.W., and went to E.N.E. We proceeded eight or ten miles along its banks before we came to fresh water. In its immediate neighbourhood, the country was beautifully grassed, and openly timbered with bloodwood, stringy-bark, the leguminous Ironbark, and the white-barked tree of the Abel Tasman.
The narrow-leaved tea-tree, in shrubs from five to seven feet high, and the broad-leaved tea-tree from twenty to twenty-five feet high, grew on a sandy loam, with many ant-hills between them; the little Severn tree and the glaucous Terminalia preferred the light sandy soil with small ironstone pebbles, on which the ant-hills were rare, or entirely wanting; the raspberry-jam tree crowded round water-holes, which were frequently rocky; and the bloodwood, the leguminous Iron-bark, the box, and apple-gum, formed patches of open forest.
The clearing of a sufficient space for the accommodation of the hut was no light task for unaccustomed hands, for the bloodwood trees were mighty and tough, and the dubious work of burning up the trunks and branches while yet green, in our eagerness for free air and tidiness, was undertaken. It was also accomplished.
The box-tree grew on the flats which separated the ridges from the creek, with the small bread-tree, the bloodwood and pandanus. As the Mangrove disappeared, the drooping tea-tree took its place. Several rocky bars crossed the "Yappar," which seemed to be the name by which the natives called it; but only one was broad enough to allow us to cross safely with our horses and bullocks.
The bergue was covered with fine bloodwood trees, stringy-bark and box. At a greater distance from the river, the trees became scanty and scattered, and, still farther, small plains extended, clothed but sparingly with a wiry grass. These plains were bounded by an open forest of the Acacia of Expedition Range.
The country on either side is of a red and white sandy soil, timbered with bloodwood, mahogany, melaleuca and black and white tea-tree, coarsely grassed, with heath and scrub running down to the banks in many places.
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