BY HON. A. NOKTON, M.L.C. 87 



country, which was fiery hot all the time I was there, he 

 got up an appearance of coolness by keeping his station 

 buildings brilliantly white. Along the river banks there were 

 outcrops of silenite ; this he collected and burnt and no lime 

 could have looked whiter. And then it made the homestead 

 look clean as no other looked. In spite of the excessive heat too, 

 he had a patch of watermelons growing beside his hut. He did 

 not carry the water for them from the river, but he had 

 sufficient energy to tell the blacks to do so and to see that his 

 instructions were carried out. When I had passed out of sight 

 of Nulcumbiddy I felt better and happier for having seen a place 

 that reminded me of the civilisation I had parted with. Any- 

 one, I was told, could grow melons as Burton Gaden did. I 

 did not doubt the assertion, but I travelled several hundred 

 miles up and down the Barwon and its tributaries without see- 

 ing whitewashed huts or luxuriant melon vines at any other 

 station. All honor then to Burton Gaden, to whom it is due. 



I did not stop at Nulcumbiddy as I was anxious to reach 

 my destination, but camped the night below Breewarrina, 

 otherwise called the Fisheries, so called because of the stone- 

 walled yards which at this spot the blacks had built up in the 

 river bed and into which they drove the fish just as stockmen 

 drive cattle into a stockyard. It was one of the few places 

 where a bar of rocks crossed the channel and the loose stones 

 were utilized for building up small yards with openings from 

 above and guiding wings between which the fish passed to the 

 opening of the upper, or receiving yard. Captain Cadelh 

 the first river navigator of New South Wales, had 

 ascended so far in 1858, and a board fixed up on one of the large 

 river gums recorded the fact, also the date of arrival, the name 

 of vessel, list of passengers, etc. Sixteen miles onwards, I 

 struck a station called Haraden, which had been stocked up by 

 Joseph Sharp, of the Clarence River, and was under the manage- 

 ment of my good friend, Archie Shannon, whom I had last 

 seen on the same river. Some dirty blacks had a camp 

 near the station, and these and others like them, Shannon 

 told me, were the only blacks he had so far met with. 

 Whites, however, had been killed in the district by the 

 aboriginals, and others were murdered afterwards, among 

 these an old schoolfellow of my own whose skull was smashed as 

 he lay asleep at his camp fire. I had no difficulty of any kind 

 with them during my sojourn in that country, and only on one 



