20 T. P. Bellchambers — The Mallee Fowl of Australia


whereas, dead, their value is counted in pence or at most a few paltry

shillings.


Think of Australia, the wonderful world museum of antiquities,

with its living fossils, the one open living page of an otherwise long-

closed book ; of its faunal and floral types of a long-dead past; its

aboriginal inhabitants belonging to the Stone Age !


Australia in the past has not proved worthy of this great charge,

which should have been held in trust for the whole world. Already

some of her unique treasures have gone into the eternal silences ;

others are perilously near the vanishing point. To many of her

scientists engrossed in the study of bones, relics and fossils, to which

so many give the higher value, are failing in their duty to the valuable

living types that are theirs to save—the Marsupialia, Monotremata,

Flightless Birds, and the Mound-builders.


One of the most interesting of these living types is the Mallee Fowl

(Lipoa ocellata), inhabiting the waterless Mallee-lands of Western and

South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, and subsisting upon

seeds of the acacia, berries and insects, and drinking, apparently, only

dew-drops hanging from the leaves. Apart from the menace of the fox

and gun, the bird is doomed by the advance of settlement, for it

cannot exist in the open lands.


For many years I made a special study of this bird, making

periodical trips into the Mallee-lands, suffering heat, hunger, and thirst

in the big lone lands, sleeping beneath the stars with the scant tracery

of leaves overhead, and the scent of the broom in my nostrils, listening

to the solemn booming notes of the cock Mallee Fowl and pondering

the mysteries of creation.


It was thus I learnt much of the life-history of these wonderful

birds, even the art of mound-building, which I then occasionally built

and successfully worked at my camp. The absorbing interest attaching

to such a work was a sure preventative of any feeling of loneliness, and

four, five, and sometimes six weeks would slip by ere I broke camp and

left these solitudes. Expenses had to be met by capturing and supplying

to various zoological societies a few of these same Mallee Fowl. This

removal of pairs from the mounds finally settled the sex habit and

proved them not communistic as supposed, but solitary. It was in



