Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/194

164 on December 28th, 1862. For these services Mr. Howitt was appointed Police Magistrate and Warden of the Goldfields in Gippsland, a post which he filled with conspicuous success during twenty-six years of incessant work from 1863 to 1889.

It was during the expedition of 1862, when he was no longer under the necessity of pushing on from day to day lest he should come too late to rescue the survivors, that Mr. Howitt found leisure to study the natives with whom he came into contact; and it was then that he gained his first insight into the social organisation of the Dieri tribe, who roamed the wilderness of Cooper's Creek and Lake Eyre. With the help of a native interpreter of the Narrinyeri tribe Mr. Howitt before long was able to make himself understood sufficiently for ordinary purposes. On this expedition also he saw for himself the wonderful transformation which after heavy rains converts the Central Australian desert into a jungle. Where an earlier explorer had beheld nothing but a dark brown wilderness without a blade of grass, Mr. Howitt rode for many days through a land of lakes, lagoons, and water-channels, with wide stretches of plains covered by a rank growth of tall plants, higher than a man on horseback, looking like vast beds of white hollyhocks in full bloom, and his horses revelled in the luxuriant herbage. So sharp was the line of demarcation between the dry and the watered land that on a steep bank, at the point to which the flood had risen, the traveller stood with the hind feet of his horse in the desert and his front feet on the teeming vegetation.

The district of Gippsland which was committed to Mr. Howitt's care extended from Wilson's Promontory to Cape Howe. It was then a wild, almost unexplored country, and every year Mr. Howitt travelled thousands of miles through it on horseback; and as he rode among the mountains and through the great forests he learned to study minutely both the rocks and the trees. His capacity