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By this time, however, Dr Leichhardt and his party were inured to every sort of abomination in the way of food, and were not difficult to please. Other troubles they had, more sensibly felt than the coarse quality of the vivers.
Dr Leichhardt favours us with a portrait of the pair, and notwithstanding the embellishments of clean frocks, flowing neck-kerchiefs, and a comb, we have seldom set eyes upon more unprepossessing countenances.
The latter, to which I shall again allude, is a particularly shuddersome reptile. I had never before seen these repulsive creatures, and, indeed, had never heard of them. I returned to the hut at noon, and to my surprise found a party of thirty or more blacks camped under some Leichhardt trees. They seemed a fairly healthy lot of savages, and were not alarmed when they saw I was carrying a gun.
When, on the blackened ground, fell heavy rain once more, the spinifex sprang up, fresh and green to look at, only in spots here and there, where a human body had fertilised the soil, it was greener than elsewhere. So Leichhardt drops out of Australian history, and with every succeeding year the chances of finding any trace grow more remote.
Their course then lay through the country traversed by Leichhardt on both his expeditions, watered by the Mackenzie and the Comet, and on the 22nd November the party reached a station on the Dawson owned by Messrs. Fitz and Connor. This successful conclusion to such an extensive expedition as he had undertaken, stamped Gregory as possessing the highest qualifications for an explorer.
Meantime, Leichhardt, encouraged by his first success, had received liberal support from the public to enable him to start on a new expedition, which at once was to settle the question of the nature of the interior, the ambitious project being nothing less than to traverse the continent from the eastern to the western shore, on much the same parallel of latitude if possible.
My friend Baron von Mueller accompanied this expedition as botanist, naturalist, surgeon and physician. Soon after his return from his northern expedition, Gregory was despatched in 1858 by the Government of New South Wales to search again for the lost explorer Leichhardt, who had then been missing ten years.
After they had been about four months out, they began to play truant, to desert Dr Leichhardt when reconnoitring, taking the provisions with them, and to wander away without permission in quest of honey and opossums.
This tribe always lingers in my memory, on account of the half-caste girl, whom I now believe to have been the daughter of Ludwig Leichhardt, the lost Australian explorer. Mr. Giles says: "Ludwig Leichhardt was a surgeon and botanist, who successfully conducted an expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, on the northern coast.
Let me ask how many boys out of a hundred in Australia, or England either, have ever read Sturt or Mitchell, Eyre, Leichhardt, Grey, or Stuart. It is possible a few may have read Cook's voyages, because they appear more national, but who has read Flinders, King, or Stokes? Is it because these narratives are Australian and true that they are not worthy of attention?
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