The rain that had fallen the day previous to my examination of these trees, and the heat of the sun causing a quantity of manna to exude from them, its mode of secretion could be more readily distinguished. It is usually secreted about the commencement of December; but it depends on the weather whether the secretion is in greater or less quantity: this season it was abundant. The manna trees had commenced during the latter part of December, to throw off their outer bark; their trunks, therefore, had a ragged appearance, and the ground underneath was strewed with dried crisped pieces which had fallen off, leaving a smooth and handsome new bark in their place. The black cockatoos (“Womberong,” and “Bulowla”) were occasionally seen in numbers, feeding upon the ripe cones of the _Banksia_, or “honeysuckles;”[123] and the smaller chattering parroquets were flying about, in hundreds, and revelling among the _Eucalypti_ trees, which were now in flower; and, like to the humming-birds, they were extracting honey from the nectaries of the blossoms. On examining one that had been shot, the beak was covered, and the mouth filled, with honey, possessing the peculiar camphorated smell of the leaves and flowers of the tree, mingled with stamina; the stomach was filled with a dark, thick honey, among which some quantity of the stamina of the Eucalyptic flowers were mingled. The Blue Mountain parrot also sips the nectar from the flowers, as well as from peaches, &c. The natives, when they kill any of these birds, suck their beaks to extract the honey with which the mouth is usually filled, and also recover that collected in the stomach. The aborigines were now collecting about the farms in expectation of a feast at the ensuing Christmas festival. I went up to one who was busily engaged in making an opossum-skin cloak: he sewed the skins together with the fibres of the bark of the “Stringy Bark” tree for thread, by first perforating holes in it with a sharp piece of bone, and then passing the thread through the holes as he proceeded. I asked him some questions, and then gave him a piece of tobacco: he asked for two piece tobacco, because “I merry busy, and you ask me much,” said blackee. I visited “Northwood,” (distant about six miles from the Plains,) the neat farm of Mr. Francis M’Arthur, and afterwards rode across the plains to Dr. Gibson’s farm, at Taranna, which is situated near the “Soldier’s Flat;” this latter place consists of several small farms, of about a hundred acres each, which were granted by government to the discharged veterans. There were small bark huts erected upon the grants, and several ripe fields of grain and vegetable gardens about them. The numerals among the aboriginal tribes of Goulburn Plains are as follows. One, Metong;—Two, Bulla;—Three, Bulla, metong;—Plenty, Nerang and Gorong.