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Updated: May 7, 2025
We walked once as far as Fabiano's wireless. The men were living in a shed made of wattle, and the Borra whistled through the cracks. There was a stove round which we sat while the men gave us tea; but the warmth it induced in one's face only intensified the feeling of cold on the back.
Off the Eketekki village we saw, for the first time, bad snags, which will require removal. About sunset the Aka-kru settlement, the largest yet noted, appeared on the left bank. Here the Akankon Mining Company has a native house of wattle and dab, looking somewhat better than the normal mud-cabin. It had been unceremoniously occupied by natives, who roared their laughter when ordered to turn out.
"Bessie," said John one lovely day, just as the afternoon was merging into evening, "Bessie" he always called her Bessie now "I am going down to the black wattle plantation by the big mealie patch. I want to see how those young trees are doing.
When the whalers of the 'Elizabeth' had been paid off, and had spent their money, they were engaged to strip wattle bark at Western Port, and were taken across in the schooner, with provisions, tools, six bullocks and a dray. During that season they stripped three hundred tons of bark and chopped it ready for bagging.
To be sure, they were taking slaves from market to market, and not bringing Soudanese captives from the extreme South, so we saw no trace of the trouble that comes of forced travel in the desert, but even that is equally shared by dealers and slave alike. The villages of Morocco are no more than collections of conical huts built of mud and wattle and palmetto, or goat and camel skins.
The making of the fences is the part that gives most trouble. Sometimes the timber for the stakes is not easily had; and even when it is plenty, it is no easy matter to drive the stakes into the bottom and wattle them, while seated in a vessel so crank as a birch canoe. Sometimes, in the rivers where the water-fowl most frequent, the current is swift, and adds to this trouble.
It wriggles up and along a ridge, with the glaucous spathes of grass trees standing like spears on each hand, and where wattle and tough she-oaks grow leanly out of hard soil, thickly strewn with buckshot gravel, rust-coloured. Soon it descends into a low valley and through a belt of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich loam.
The ground boasted no pavilion save a shed used for the preparation of afternoon tea a building of which the extreme heat made it almost possible to boil the kettle without lighting a fire! Naturally, no one used it for purposes of watching the play, but there was a row of wattle trees along one side of the ground, and seats placed in their shade made an excellent natural grand stand.
Now and then they pass the solitary hut of a charcoal-burner, surrounded by its little patch of meagre corn; a pack of cur dogs rush out and bark fiercely, within the safe limits of the wattle fence surrounding the premises; white-headed children gaze from the doorways at the passing carriages.
We passed the forenoon in still enlarging the tank, and as soon as a bucketful drained in, it was given to one of the horses. We planted the seeds of a lot of vegetables and trees here, such as Tasmanian blue gum, wattle, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, maize, etc.; and then Mr. Tietkens and I got our horses and rode to the main hills to the west, in hopes of discovering more water.
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