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He pointed to the W.N.W. as the direction in which the settlement lay. We travelled about five miles over stony ironstone ridges, with extensive groves of Livistona palm covering their slopes. Here Baki Baki desired to dismount; and, telling us that it was a very good road to Balanda, took his leave and returned.
As our horses had been driven far from the camp by the grey horse-fly and by a large brown fly with green eyes, which annoyed us particularly before sunset, and shortly after sunrise, we had to wait a long time for them, and employed ourselves, in the meanwhile, with cutting and eating the tops of Livistona.
They were all composed of a clayey ironstone, and clothed with patches of scrub, formed principally of Calythrix, and with a more open forest of Cypress pine, white-gum, tea-trees, bloodwood, Livistona palms, Pandanus, with shrubby Terminalias and Coniogetons.
The Livistona palm and Cochlospermum gossypium grew on the ridges; the tea-tree, the stringy-bark, the leguminous Ironbark and Eugenia were useful timber. The whole country was most magnificently grassed. A Porphyritic sienite cropped out at the head of the first swamp, about a mile from our last camp. A low range was seen at the south-east end of the large swamp on which we encamped. Nov. 26.
A pretty little Sida, a Convolvolus, and Grewia, were growing amongst the young grass. Mr. Calvert saw the Livistona palm. We felt a breeze from the eastward during the afternoon, as usual, and the strong night breeze from north and north-east; but, in the morning, a wind from north-west and west, which belonged probably to another system of atmospherical movements.
Livistona inermis, R. Br. formed small groves; and Pandanus covered the hollows and banks of two small creeks with rocky water-holes going to the westward. About six miles from our last camp, an immense plain opened before us, at the west side of which we recognized the green line of the river.
We travelled about eleven or twelve miles to the northward, for the greater part through forest land, large tracts of which were occupied solely by Livistona. A species of Acacia and stringy-bark saplings formed a thick underwood.
It is probably the Livistona rotundifolia of botanists, and is the most complete and beautiful fan-leaf I have ever seen, serving admirably for folding into water-buckets and impromptu baskets, as well as for thatching and other purposes.
The first part of the stage was more hilly, and intersected by a greater number of creeks, going down to west and north-west, than the latter part, which was a sandy, level forest of stringy-bark and Melaleuca gum. Livistona inermis, R. Br. grew from twenty to thirty feet high, with a very slender stem and small crown, and formed large groves in the stringy-bark forest.
Many were in blossom, others were in fruit; the latter is an oblong little stone fruit of very bitter taste. Only the lowest part of the young shoots is eatable, the remainder being too bitter. I think they affected the bowels even more than the shoots of the Corypha palm. We made a short Sunday stage through a fine forest, in which Livistona became more and more frequent.
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