88 CONFESSIONS OF A BEACHCOMBER 



This island, which has an area of about 20 acres, bears 

 a resemblance to a jockey's cap the sand spit towards the 

 setting sun forming the peak, a precipice covered with scrub 

 and jungle, the back. Here, long ago, a great gathering 

 from the neighbouring islands and the mainland took place. 

 Early in the morning all formed up in line on the sand 

 spit. Diverging, but maintaining order, men, gins, pic- 

 caninnies, shouting, yelling, and screaming, and clashing 

 nulla-nullas (throwing-sticks), supported by barking and 

 yelping dogs, swept the timid wallabies up through the 

 tangle of jungle, until like the Gaderene swine they ran, or 

 rather hopped, down a steep place into the sea, or fell on 

 fatal rocks laid bare by the ebb-tide. Those who partook 

 of the last of the wallabies have gone the way of all flesh, 

 and the incident is instructive only as an illustration of the 

 manner in which animals may suddenly disappear from 

 confined localities, leaving no relic of previous existence. 

 Considering the bulk of Dunk Island (3^ square miles), 

 and recognising the rule that islands are necessarily 

 poorer in species than continents, it is yet remarkable 

 that no evidence of marsupials is to be found, and that 

 the oldest blacks maintain that none of the type ever 

 existed here. 



Though the drawings in caves depict lizards, echidna, 

 turtle and men, there is no representation of kangaroo or 

 wallaby. It is highly probable that if such had been 

 common, the black artists would have chosen them as 

 subjects, since nearly all their studies are from Nature. 



The largest and heaviest four-footed creature now 

 existent on Dunk Island is the so-called porcupine (spiny 

 ant-eater or echidna). An animal which possesses some of 

 the features of the hedgehog of old England, and resembles 

 in others that distinctly Australian paradox, the platypus, 

 which has a mouth which it cannot open a mere tube 

 through which the tongue is thrust, which in the production 

 of its young combines the hatching of an egg as of a bird, 

 with the suckling of a mammal, and which also has some of 

 the characteristics of a reptile, cannot fail to be an interesting 



