OIL-PAPER UMBRELLAS DRYING IN THE SUN.
From a Photograph.
THE LAST CREEK.
By John Mackie.
The story of an eventful journey in the Australian bush, with hostile blacks on the track. Mr. Mackie got through, but the passage of the last creek was a distinctly touch-and-go affair.
SCHOONERS must have grub, and I had accompanied ours round to Normanton for supplies, leaving only one white man, a Malay, a Cingalese, and two semi-civilized black boys to look after the station and store I had established on the lonely Calvert River, in the south-western corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Now a bushman had just arrived at Normanton who had passed my place on the Calvert a few days before. He told of a sorry state of affairs. My men had run out of rations and, what was worse, powder and shot. They were now subsisting on a little rice, what few fish they could catch in the swollen river, 'possums, iguanas, and snakes. This was certainly pretty near bed-rock; but people in the Gulf country in those days did not trouble much about their bill of fare; it was the blacks, flies, and fever that concerned them most, and the blacks near my place just then were particularly bad. They had come down in a body some days previously, killed two or three of my remaining horses, and tried their level best to get at my men. Fortunately, after a ruinous consumption of powder and shot, they had been driven off.
There was only one thing for it—I must get to my station at any cost, and that at once. To have it left to the mercy of the blacks was to have it looted and burned to the ground, and all my schemes knocked on the head.