Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/191

Rh despatched by the Victorian Government on the task of exploration. This time he went with a party of picked miners to prospect for gold in the rugged, mountainous, trackless, and then almost unknown region of Gippsland, in south-eastern Victoria, where in winter the snow lies for months on the peaks and tablelands, and where in the dense jungle of the valleys the trees grow to heights scarcely equalled on earth. The mission was successful; goldfields were opened on the Crooked, Dargo, and Wentworth Rivers. It was during this expedition that Mr. Howitt first became keenly interested in the eucalyptus trees, to which in after life he paid much attention, acquiring an intimate knowledge of the subject both from the practical and the scientific point of view.

In the year 1860 an ill-fated expedition, equipped at lavish cost and led by Burke and Wills, had started from Melbourne amid the enthusiasm of the citizens to traverse Australia from south to north. When month after month passed and no word came of the explorers, great uneasiness was felt in Victoria, and on June 18th, 1861, it was decided to send out a search party to their relief Of this party Mr. Howitt was appointed leader. He started on July 14th, and journeyed north to Menindie on the Darling River, then the last outpost of civilisation, if indeed civilisation can be said to be represented by a public-house, a shop, a lock-up, and a knot of bearded men in cabbage-tree hats, who, so far as they did not pass their leisure hours in the contemplative seclusion of the lock-up, devoted them to smoking and lounging in the public-house, discussing the latest "brush with the niggers," and criticising the stores offered for the use of explorers, particularly the dried beef, which they smelt and tasted with the air of connoisseurs. Leaving these representatives of the higher culture behind, Mr. Howitt and his small party, with their horses and camels, struck westward into the desert. He has described his