With the exception of the gums which grow thickly in the rich ground on the banks of the creek, there are no neighbouring trees of any great height. The telegraph station itself is in a fork of the creek.
In the stone walls of one of the cottages are several portholes—reminders of other days, when the natives were troublesome. To-day the blacks would be almost as likely to wage war on the citizens of Adelaide as to attack the inmates of one of those telegraph stations.
An enthusiastic cyclist (but minus a bicycle) was stationed, as assistant, at Powell's Creek. An amateur photographer also in same person, equipped, too with a camera; and during the several days I remained, several excellent photos of the bicycle were taken—some with a lubra or a blackboy "up."
My boots were mended with copper wire; and my cleaner pair of pyjamas (kept in reserve and put on in any sheltering clump of bushes or behind a hid-tree, immediately on sighting telegraph or other station buildings) were minus half a leg. Further, I gave them here, as I did people everywhere, to understand I was a nobody—one of whom they probably never again would hear anything more. Yet I was received as courteously, and welcomed as cordially, as if I had been an influential politician or a titled governor's son.
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From Powell's Creek it is but 54 miles to Newcastle Waters homestead. The road from the telegraph station to Lawson's Creek (26 miles) runs mostly either alongside or over low spurs and branches of the Ashburton Range, with occasional stretches of sand and clay flats.
When cycling through range country I have nearly always found the track, where track there was, fair for riding on; and there is ever a bright novelty in the panoramic changes. Any sort of surface, in fact, in preference to sand.
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