This day I requested Mr. Stapylton to cross the piece of water where we had encamped, and endeavour to find the river in a north-east direction; but he ascertained that the watercourse turned northward, and to the west of north, without entering the river, as far as he traced it. He then returned after having followed its course five miles without falling in with the main stream. His party saw some of the natives who could not be induced to stop by all the calls of Piper.
NATIVE WEIRS FOR FISH.
Mr. Stapylton observed in the channel he traced a net or fence of boughs which the natives had that morning set up; and which showed not only that they expected a flood, but also, from the manner in which it was placed, that the water would flow first up the channel. This circumstance, as already observed, is not unusual in ana-branches where the lower end is naturally on a lower level, having been worn by the currents into a deeper channel there than at the upper end, where the water not unfrequently leaves the river by overflowing its banks in various channels of small depth.
THEIR NETS FOR CATCHING DUCKS.
The natives had left in one place a net suspended across the river between two lofty trees, evidently for the purpose of catching ducks and other waterfowl. The meshes were about two inches wide, and the net hung down to within five feet of the surface of the stream. In order to obtain waterfowl with this net some of the natives proceed up, and others down, the river to scare the birds from other places and, when any flight comes into the net, it is suddenly lowered into the water, thus entangling the birds beneath until the natives go into the water and secure them. Among the first specimens of art manufactured by the primitive inhabitants of these wilds none come so near our own as the net which, even in quality, as well as the mode of knotting, can scarcely be distinguished from those made in Europe. As these natives possess but little besides what was essentially necessary to their existence, we may conclude that they have used spears for killing the kangaroo, stone-axes for cutting out the opossum, and nets for catching birds, or kangaroos, or fish, since their earliest occupation of Australia.* Almost every specimen of art they possess is the result of urgent necessity. Perhaps the iron tomahawk is the only important addition made to their implements during many centuries.
(*Footnote. Isaiah 24:17 Fear, and the pit, and the snare are upon thee.] "These images are taken from the different methods of hunting and taking wild beasts which were anciently in use. The snare or toils were a series of nets enclosing, at first, a great space of ground in which the wild beasts were known to be, and drawn in by degrees into a narrower compass till they were at last closely shut up and entangled in them." Harmer. This is precisely the method adopted by the Australian natives at present for the same or similar purposes.)
REMARKABLE CHARACTER OF THE LAKES.
On laying down my survey of the country which we had lately passed over I found that the lakes were nearly all circular or oval, and that a very regularly curved ridge, as before stated, bounded the eastern shore of all of them. The number of lakes or hollows of this character already seen by us to the south-west of the Murray amounted to eleven. In three of them the water was salt, and the greater number had no communication with the river; but between it and the others there was a narrow creek or gully, but accessible only to the highest floods. The northern margin of one of the salt lakes consisted of a bank of white sand on which grew thickly a kind of pine, different from the trees around. The channels between the river and the lakes seemed neither to belong to the original arrangement of watercourses, nor to ana-branches of the rivers; for they frequently extended upwards in directions opposed to that of the river's course. The fact being established that some of these lakes have no obvious connection with the river, it becomes probable that they are the remains of what the surface was before the fluviatile process began to carry off its waters. I had no difficulty in referring to an early system of this kind other lakes which we had seen elsewhere, the anomalous peculiarities of which were equally remarkable. Among these were Cudjallagong and others adjacent; Waljeers; the two smaller on the Murrumbidgee named Weromba; also Lake Benanee and Prooa its neighbour; in all which the peculiarities accorded with what I had observed in those on the left bank of the Murray.
MR. STAPYLTON'S EXCURSION IN SEARCH OF THE MAIN STREAM.
June 27.