Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals of Five Exploring Expeditions into and Through Central South Australia and Western Australia, from 1872 to 1876Giles, Ernest
History
Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals of Five Exploring Expeditions into and Through Central South Australia and Western Australia, from 1872 to 1876
Giles, Ernest
Australia -- Discovery and exploration
The scrub here and all the way we had come consisted mostly of mallee
(Eucalyptus dumosa) mulga, prickly bushes (hakea), some
grevillea-trees, and a few oaks (casuarinas). This place, Whitegin,
was eighty-five miles straight from Youldeh; we had, however,
travelled about 100 miles to reach it, as Jimmy kept turning and
twisting about in the scrubs in all directions. On leaving Whitegin we
travelled several degrees to north of east, the thermometer in the
shade while we rested there going up to 103 degrees. Jimmy said the
next place we should get water at was Wynbring, and from what we could
make out of his jargon, he seemed to imply that Wynbring was a large
watercourse descending from a mountain and having a stony bed; he also
said we were now close up, and that it was only a pickaninny way.
However, the shades of night descended upon us once more in the scrubs
of this desert, and we were again compelled to encamp in a place
lonely, and without water, amidst the desolations of this
scrub-enthroned tract. Choking with thirst and sleepless with anxiety,
we pass the hours of night; no dews descend upon this heated place,
and though towards dawn a slightly cooler temperature is felt, the
reappearance of the sun is now so near, that there has been no time
for either earth or man to be benefited by it. Long before the sun
himself appears, those avant-couriers of his fiery might, heated glow,
and feverish breeze, came rustling through the foliage of the
mallee-trees, which give out the semblance of a mournful sigh, as
though they too suffered from the heat and thirst of this desolate
region, in which they are doomed by fate to dwell, and as though they
desired to let the wanderers passing amongst them know, that they also
felt, and were sorry for, our woes.
The morning of March 31st was exceedingly hot, the thermometer at dawn
standing at 86 degrees. We were up and after the camels and horses
long before daylight, tracking them by the light of burning torches of
great bunches and boughs of the mallee trees--these burn almost as
well green as dry, from the quantity of aromatic eucalyptic oil
contained in them--and enormous plots of spinifex which we lighted as
we passed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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