<hw>Black-Snake.</hw> See under <i>Snake</i>.
<hw>Black-Swan.</hw> See <i>Swan</i>.
<hw>Black Thursday</hw>, the day of a Victorian conflagration, which occurred on Feb. 6, 1851. The thermometer was 112 degrees in the shade. Ashes from the fire at Macedon, 46 miles away, fell in Melbourne. The scene forms the subject of the celebrated picture entitled "Black Thursday," by William Strutt, R.B.A.
1859. Rev. J. D. Mereweather, `Diary of a Working Clergyman in Australia,' p. 81:
"Feb. 21 . . . Dreadful details are reaching us of the great bush fires which took place at Port Phillip on the 6th of this month . . . . Already it would seem that the appellation of `Black Thursday' has been given to the 6th February, 1851, for it was on that day that the fires raged with the greatest fury."
1889. Rev. J. H. Zillman, `Australian Life,' p. 39:
"The old colonists still repeat the most terrible stories of Black Thursday, when the whole country seemed to be on fire. The flames leaped from tree to tree, across creeks, hills, and gullies, and swept everything away. Teams of bullocks in the yoke, mobs of cattle and horses, and even whole families of human beings, in their bush-huts, were completely destroyed, and the charred bones alone found after the wind and fire had subsided."
<hw>Black-Tracker</hw>, <i>n</i>. an aboriginal employed in tracking criminals.
1867. `Australia as it is,' pp. 88-9:
"The native police, or `black trackers,' as they are sometimes called, are a body of aborigines trained to act as policemen, serving under a white commandant—a very clever expedient for coping with the difficulty . . . of hunting down and discovering murderous blacks, and others guilty of spearing cattle and breaking into huts . . ."