SOUTH AUSTRALIA. 113 



question visited the Northern Territory, he might have classified one hundred 

 and eleven orders. Fire-flies flit about; beetles display their metallic brilliancy; 

 radiant moths and butterflies fleck the gloom. The observant man admires and 

 marvels ; but not always does the view charm, for myriads of mosquitoes and 

 sand-flies have at him, and the bung-fly, attacking the eyelid, will cause a 

 swelling that will close up the eye for several days. Ants are found literally in 

 legions. In the houses some amusement is to be derived from watching the 

 ant-eating lizard, who is. allowed to run up and down the walls without 

 molestation, and is, indeed, welcomed as a highly useful domestic animal. In 

 the bush surprise is excited by the enormous ant-hills. Some are twenty-five 

 feet in height, and six or eight feet in diameter ; but usually they are from six 

 to twelve feet high, and about four feet in diameter ; and along a belt of 

 country extending perhaps one hundred miles, they may stand apart but fifty 

 or a hundred feet. To level these cunningly devised cellular structures, 

 occasionally, would prove far more costly than levelling the ground of timber. 

 In other places the ' meridional ' ant-hill is met with. These edifices are from 

 three to six feet high, and more. They are broad at the base, and taper to a 

 point at the summit. The form therefore is that of a long wedge, and the 

 peculiarity is that all the summit lines are true north and south, as though laid 

 down by a surveyor. 



In the rivers the traveller is introduced to the alligator. Many are the 

 tales of horror and of escape related in connection with these saurians. One 

 member of the original exploring party of the South Australian Government, 

 a man named Reid, fell asleep in a boat on the Roper river, with his leg 

 hanging carelessly over the side of the craft. An alligator seized the limb 

 and dragged the man out of the boat, his screams too late calling attention 

 to his fate. The alligator is found right down the Queensland coast. While 

 writing, the following telegram appears in the Ai'gus (Melbourne, March 10, 

 1886): 'A girl named Margaret Gordon, the daughter of a dairyman on 

 Cattle Creek, thirty miles from Townsville, has been devoured by an alligator. 

 She went with a servant-girl to the creek for water, when a large alligator 

 rushed at her and carried her off. The occurrence was witnessed by the girl's 

 father, who was unable to render any assistance.' 



The one trace left of the early settlements of Raffles Bay and Port 

 Essington is that herds of buffaloes are to be met with in the districts in 

 question, and also some Timor ponies. Both animals were introduced from 

 Timor, and when the settlements were abandoned males and females were 

 left to run wild. The buffaloes have spread alpng the north coast, nearly, if 

 not quite, to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and to the south as far as the bottom 

 of Van Diemen's Gulf. They are generally found congregated in herds of 

 twenty to fifty, under the guidance of a single full-grown male, oftentimes of 

 enormous size. But stragglers are often met with far beyond these limits. 

 The young males are turned out of the herd by the patriarch as soon as 



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