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However, the bark might have grown over the marking on the tree and several trees showed places where bark had been cut out by the natives for coolimans, and subsequently closed again or the tree might have been burned, or blown down.
Native soaks dug out with sticks and wooden "coolimans" small troughs used as spades or as a means of carrying seeds, water, or game are by no means uncommon, and, when holding water, are easily made more serviceable by throwing out a few shovelsful of sticks, stones, and sand, with which they are generally choked.
Numerous old native camps surrounded the water, and many weapons, spears, waddies, and coolimans were lying about. The camps had not been occupied for some long time. In the scrub we came on a cleared space, some eighty yards long and ten to twelve feet wide. At each end were heaps of ashes, and down the middle ran a well-beaten path, and a similar one on either side not unlike an old dray track.
Scattered about were several utensils, two wooden coolimans full of water and grass this showing that the owners contemplated a journey, for the grass floating on the surface is used to prevent the water from spilling. Two more coolimans were filled with seed a fine yellow seed from a plant like groundsel.
We saw where the woman had dug out bardies from the roots of a wattle, where the buck had unearthed a rat,* and where together they had chased a lizard. Finally we reached their camp. Several implements lay about, including two bark coolimans. These, the simplest form of cooliman, are made by peeling the bark off the projecting lumps so common on the stems of bloodwoods.
An empty meat tin and a few nails does not sound a very great reward for their enforced services, and yet they would have been far less pleased with a handful of sovereigns; they could put these to no use whatever, whereas the tins will make small "coolimans," and the nails, set in spinifex-gum on the end of a waddy, will find their way into a neighbour's head.
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