

3?2 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



a slight westerly inclination, and the range to which Mount Liptrap belongs dips down- 

 ward to the sea at the point; close to the shore, which is marshy in places and inter- 

 sected by shallow lakes and reedy lagoons, lie half-a-dozen diminutive islands. At Point 

 Sniythe the entrance is reached of a large estuary, curving round in a south-easterly 

 direction for a distance of ten miles, but nowhere exceeding two miles in breadth. It 

 is known as Anderson's Inlet, and receives the waters of the Tarwin, a river that takes 

 its rise in the ranges near Mirboo, forty or fifty miles distant from the coast ; but its 

 intermediate meanderings are as yet undefined. Opposite to Point Smythe is Point 

 Norman, a mile or two south of which rises, in Venus Bay, an isolated mass, appro- 

 priately named the Petrel Rock, for here 



Amidst the flashing of feathery foam, 



The stormy petrel finds a home ; 



A home, if such a place may be, 



For her who lives on the wide, wide sea. 



Four miles to the westward of the entrance to Venus Bay is Cape Paterson. In its 

 immediate neighbourhood are numerous coal-seams, but in no case have the shafts, 

 which were sunk to test the thickness of the veins, revealed the existence of more than 

 two feet four inches of coal, lying for the most part upon sandy or dark gray shales, 

 interspersed with bands of indurated clay. 



After passing Cape Paterson we skirt the county of Mornington for a distance of 

 fifteen miles, as the crow flies, to the eastern entrance to Western Port, where the most 

 notable landmark is the narrow promontory, resembling the head of a spear, which juts 

 out into the sea from Phillip Island, with Cape Woolamai at its acute point. Upon this 

 bluff, which is connected with the Island by a narrow ridge of rock, thousands of 

 mutton-birds annually congregate for the purpose of laying their eggs and rearing their 

 young, acting in concert, organized like a regiment of soldiers, and taking up the posi- 

 tions assigned to them by their leaders with an order, a regularity and an obedience 

 which denote a rare intelligence and the perfection of discipline. Their collective resting- 

 place is a huge parallelogram, surrounded by a low wall of stones. It is swept smooth by 

 the birds, and subdivided into a number of square enclosures, in the centre of which 

 the female bird hollows out a cavity wherein to . deposit her eggs, and when the process 

 of incubation has been completed, and the young are sufficiently strong for flight, the 

 whole colony takes wing to other regions, from which it will return, in the year 

 following, almost on the very day and hour of its previous visit. 



Phillip Island presents a general resemblance in shape to a turtle, with its carapace 

 to the north, its head to the west, and one fin stretched out so as to form what is 

 called Pyramid Rock. The southern coast-line, from Point Grant to Cape Woolamai, a 

 distance of five-and-twenty miles, is defined by ruddy cliffs of ironstone, rising to a 

 height of a hundred feet, and scooped into hollows by the action of the waves. At low 

 water masses of black rock are seen stretching far out into the sea, and presenting the 

 appearance of a huge causeway roughly paved with boulders worn to the same level, 

 and curiously fissured by the incessant planing of the sea ; the breakers that roll in upon 

 this rugged platform from the south-west marking their sinuous outline by a broad and 

 fluctuating fringe of foam. At a little distance from the shore the waves have sculp- 

 tured some outlying rocks into fantastic shapes. One of these has received the appro- 



