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Updated: May 18, 2025
"Well, you are gauging him by a standard that's foreign to his class of mind," replied Andrews. "If he had been as strange to that gilgie as you were, and had got the same directions he gave you, he would have found it first shot. When a certain class of bushman says 'mallee', he means any sort of scrub except lignum; and when he says 'mulga', he means any tree except pine or currajong.
I intend to proceed north of west to intersect any creek or country that may come from the good country that we found on our south-east course, and the land of kangaroos; there is no hope of anything here. Camped without water. Distance to-day, twenty miles. Thursday, 29th July, Mulga Plain, West of Lake Gairdner. Our course to-day is 310 degrees.
The war-spears are different and lighter, the hinder third of them being reed, the other two-thirds mulga wood; they are barbed, and thrown with a wommerah, to a distance up to 150 yards, and are sometimes ten feet long. After our meal we found a better supply of water in a creek about two miles southward, where there was both a rock reservoir and sand water.
Most of the acacias are of this kind the ACACIA PENDULA or myall, the brigalow, the mulga, and yarran. The CAESARIANSAE common all over Australia, under the name of the oak tree.
The first four miles was over a beautiful grassy plain, with mulga wood, not very thick; it then became more sandy, and covered with gum, cork-trees, and other scrubs, which continued within a mile of where we camped, in a small, but beautiful grassed plain; no water. Latitude 20 degrees 38 minutes 33 seconds. Wind, south-east. Friday, 12th April, Grassy Plain. Started at 6.15 a.m., same course.
What a pretty sight it is to see a mob of horses trooping in for water at night; the young colts kicking up their heels with delight; the solemn old packhorse looking with scorn on the gambols of his juvenile brethren, with a shake of his hardy old head, as much as to say, "Ah! wait till you've done the dry stages that I have; wait till you make your evening feed off mulga scrub and bark that'll take the buck out of you!
We had great difficulty in getting through, from the quantity of dead timber, which has torn our saddle-bags and clothes to pieces. There are a number of gum-trees, and the new tree that was found on Captain Sturt's expedition, 1844, but mulga predominates. At fourteen miles we struck a large gum plain, but after a short time again entered the scrub.
Yarloo therefore built them a rough sun-shelter of mulga boughs and they rested under this all day, doing nothing which would create thirst. In spite of every care, however, their mouths were clammy and their throats calling out for water long before sunset.
"So he'll find me, something regular to do a bit of fencing, or carpentering, or painting, or something, and then I'll begin to call up for my stuff again, as usual." We lay in camp in the fringe of the mulga, and watched the big, red, smoky, rising moon out on the edge of the misty plain, and smoked and thought together sociably.
On April 15th we left Yindi, having seen the last water twenty-six miles back near Gundockerta, and passed Mount Quinn, entering a dense thicket of mulga, which lasted for the next twenty miles. It was most awkward country to steer through, and I often overheard Luck muttering to himself that I was going all wrong, for he was a first-rate bushman and I a novice.
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