Australia Twice Traversed - The Romance Of Exploration, Through Central South Australia, And Western Australia, From 1872 To 1876 By Ernest Giles
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It Would Have Been Far Easier To Have Converted Him To
Christianity Than To Make Him Alter His Original Opinion.
With regard
to Tommy's ideas, I may say that nearly all Australian natives are
familiar with the motions of
The heavenly bodies, knowing the
difference between a star and a planet, and all tribes that I have
been acquainted with have proper names for each, the moon also being a
very particular object of their attention.
While at this water we occasionally saw hawks, crows, corellas, a
pink-feathered kind of cockatoo, and black magpies, which in some
parts of the country are also called mutton birds, and pigeons. One
day Peter Nicholls shot a queer kind of carrion bird, not so large as
a crow, although its wings were as long. It had the peculiar dancing
hop of the crow, its plumage was of a dark slate colour, with whitish
tips to the wings, its beak was similar to a crow's.
We had now been at this depot for nine days, and on the 6th of October
we left it behind to the eastward, as we had done all the other
resting places we had found. I desired to go as straight as possible
for Mount Churchman. Its position by the chart is in latitude 29
degrees 58', and longitude 118 degrees. Straight lines on a map and
straight lines through dense scrubs are, however, totally different,
and, go as straight as we could, we must make it many miles farther
than its distance showed by the chart.
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