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Updated: June 29, 2025
Tea-trees with white papery bark and pale yellow flowers dripping with spirity nectar, the sunflower-tree with its masses of gold, an occasional wattle, and slim palms mirror themselves, and here and there compact jungle, with its entanglement of ponderous vines and smothering creepers, shoulders away the salt-loving plants.
All the country intervening between the creeks and the plain was undulating stringy-bark forest. I left my companions in the shady belt of drooping tea-trees, and rode with Charley towards the natives, in order to obtain information. They were, however, only women and children, and they withdrew at my approach, although I had dismounted and left my horse far behind with Charley.
The warm sand nurses my body. My other self seeks consolation among the planets. "Thin huge stage presenteth naught but show Whereon the stars in secret influence comment." A grey mist masks the winding of a mainland river. Isolated blotches indicate lonely lagoons and swamps where slim palms and lank tea-trees stand in crowded, whispering ranks knee-deep in dull brown water. The mist spreads.
In the valley, the creek murmured over a pebbly bed, and enlarged from time to time, into fine sheets of water. We rested ourselves in the shade of its drooping tea-trees; and, observing another slope about two miles farther, went to examine it, but finding that its sandstone crest was too steep for our purpose, we returned to mark a line of road from the first slope to our camp.
In a tract of broad-leaved tea-tree forest, we came to a watercourse, which led us to a fine creek surrounded with Pandanus and drooping tea-trees, and containing a chain of deep water-holes in its bed. Its course was from west to east. Sept. 20. We removed our camp to the creek I had found last night, about nine miles north-west from the Robinson.
Two emus had just made their breakfast on some Nonda fruit when we started them, and Charley and Brown, assisted by Spring, succeeded in killing one of them. We soon came to a salt-water river, with a broad sandy bed, perfectly free of vegetation, although its banks were fringed with drooping tea-trees. The tide being low, we were enabled to ford it.
We travelled about nine miles west by north, through an open tea-tree forest skirting the heads of those scrubby creeks which went down to the salt water, the dark mangrove line of which we had seen yesterday. But we crossed four good sized dry creeks, lined with drooping tea-trees and white-gum trees.
I imagined that we had arrived at the west side of Port Essington, and that the creek on which we encamped was probably the Warvi. To ascertain this, I rode down the creek with Charley: it became more open; limited flats of sandy alluvium were clothed with the refreshing verdure of young grass, and with groves of Banksias; its hollows were fringed with large drooping tea-trees.
The distracted hawk has at length to retreat dinnerless to the swampy margin of the river where the tallest tea-trees wave their feathery tops in the wind. In like manner the human hawk was driven from the township. He descended in the scale of crime, stole a horse, and departed by night. Bill, the butcher, said next day: "Nosey has gone for good this time.
A brief interlude, and the pandanus choir gives voice again, stronger and resonant; the companions of the coco-nuts join lustily, the strain reverberates from the wet lands below, resounds through the forest, and is lost in the mellow distance of the tea-trees.
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