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As, however, the natives do not seem very clear in their knowledge of the difference between flowing from and flowing to, it was probable that Cooper's Creek, not then discovered by Sturt, was the foundation of the legend, or possibly the Paroo.
The town is supposed to be situated on the banks of a river called the Paroo, but we saw no water there, except what passed for it in a tank. The goats and sheep and dogs and the rest of the population drink there. It is dangerous to take too much of that water in a raw state. Except in flood-time you couldn't find the bed of the river without the aid of a spirit-level and a long straight-edge.
I may here remark that poor Conn and two other exploring comrades of those days, named Curlewis and McCulloch, were all subsequently, not only killed but partly eaten by the wild natives of Australia Conn in a place near Cooktown on the Queensland coast, and Curlewis and McCulloch on the Paroo River in New South Wales in 1862.
You had me once working on the Paroo. "It was a blazing hot day in Central Queensland on one of the big cattle stations out from the railway line, a station which had not yet reached the dignity of fencing. The boss remembered that Jim Stone "was a good sort," and that it was forty miles to the next chance of a job. And there was always something to be done on a station. "'All right, Stone.
About the middle of the third day, upon arrival at the wished-for relief, to their horror and surprise they found the water-hole was dry by no means an unusual thing in Australian travel. The horses were already nearly dead; McIntyre, without attempting to search either up or down the channel of the watercourse, immediately ordered a retreat to the last water in the Paroo.
The previous year McIntyre had visited a water-hole in the Cooper some seventy-four or seventy-five miles from his camp on the Paroo, and now ordered the whole of his heavily-laden beasts and all the men to start for the distant spot. The few appliances they had for carrying water soon became emptied.
The return of McIntyre and the camels loaded with water saved their lives at the time; but what was his chagrin and surprise to find the party just where he had left them, nearly dead, most of them delirious, with all the horses gone, when he had expected to meet them so much nearer the Paroo.
Less than three dozen miles per road, and not many more minutes by train from the greatest city in the Southern hemisphere, yet many of its native population are more unpolished in appearance than the bush-whackers from beyond Bourke, the Cooper, and the far Paroo. It is an agricultural region, and this in some measure accounts for the slouching appearance of its people.
On his return, finding that there was still no chance of his being allowed to take his stock on, he determined to make a trip to the Gulf of Carpentaria and examine the country he intended taking up. The party left the Paroo on the 21St June, 1864, and the journey led to an unexpected discovery.
M'Intyre, who, in 1864, was taking stock from the Darling to the Flinders River, found himself stopped on the Queensland border by the stock regulations then in force in that colony. Whilst detained there he made several short excursions, and examined the country between the head of the Paroo and the Barcoo, discovering many well-watered creeks and a lake of considerable size.
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