y seen indications of their having so obtained it, but I had
never before seen the process actually gone through. Selecting a large
healthy looking tree out of the gum-scrub, and growing in a hollow, or
flat between two ridges, the native digs round at a few feet from the
trunk, to find the lateral roots; to one unaccustomed to the work, it is
a difficult and laborious thing frequently to find these roots, but to
the practised eye of the native, some slight inequality of the surface,
or some other mark, points out to him their exact position at once, and
he rarely digs in the wrong place. Upon breaking the end next to the
tree, the root is lifted, and run out for twenty or thirty feet; the bark
is then peeled off, and the root broken into pieces, six or eight inches
long, and these again, if thick, are split into thinner pieces; they are
then sucked, or shaken over a piece of bark, or stuck up together in the
bark upon their ends, and water is slowly discharged from them; if
shaken, it comes out like a shower of very fine rain. The roots vary in
diameter from one inch to three; the best are those from one to two and a
half inches, and of great length. The quantity of water contained in a
good root, would probably fill two-thirds of a pint. I saw my own boys
get one-third of a pint out in this way in about a quarter of an hour,
and they were by no means adepts at the practice, having never been
compelled to resort to it from necessity.

Natives who, from infancy, have been accustomed to travel through arid
regions, can remain any length of time out in a country where there are
no indications of water. The circumstance of natives being seen, in
travelling through an unknown district, is therefore no proof of the
existence of water in their vicinity. I have myself observed, that no
part of the country is so utterly worthless, as not to have attractions
sufficient occasionally to tempt the wandering savage into its recesses.
In the arid, barren, naked plains of the north, with not a shrub to
shelter him from the heat, not a stick to burn for his fire (except what
he carried with him), the native is found, and where, as far as I could
ascertain, the whole country around appeared equally devoid of either
animal or vegetable life. In other cases, the very regions, which, in the
eyes of the European, are most barren and worthless, are to the native
the most valuable and productive. Such are dense brushes, or sandy tracts
of coun