428 
Miscellanea. 
to call his Lordship’s attention to several parts of iny Journal, 
and to explain more fully than I could otherwise have done, the 
circumstances in which I am placed, and the grounds on which 
I have thought it expedient to adopt the measures I have done, 
it remains for me to report, through you, to His Excellency, 
for the further information of the Secretary of State, the progress 
of the expedition under my command, since I last addressed you. 
I believe, that in my letter of the 17th of October, 1844, 
I reported that I had passed along the Darling without any 
rupture with the natives, and that the reports I had heard at 
Lake Victoria, of the massacre of a party of Europeans, had 
proved incorrect; the whole story having been based on Major 
Mitchell’s rupture with the natives in 1836. 1 also reported 
that I was about to leave the camp on an excursion to the north¬ 
west, to examine the country seen by Mr. Poole. I accordingly 
left Cawndilla, to which place I had moved the camp from the 
junction of the Williorara with the Darling, on the 21st of the 
month, accompanied by Mr. Browne, two of my men, and a 
native. We crossed a plain of about thirty miles in breadth, on 
a W.N.W. course, and at that distance struck a creek, which led 
us, on a bearing of 132°, to a gap in the front line of some hills 
towards which we were approaching. Passing through this gap, 
we gradually rose to an elevated table land, surrounded on all 
sides by ranges. Whilst we were on the Darling, a flood oc¬ 
curred in that river, which I had hoped was caused by rains in 
the hills laid down by Sir Thomas Mitchell, and that they were 
conveyed into the Darling by the channel of the Williorara, in 
which case I should have found an easy entrance into the N.W. 
interior along its banks; my object being to gain a position north 
of Mount Arden. On my arrival at that place I had been disap¬ 
pointed in this expectation, the Williorara being nothing more 
than a channel of communication between the river and the 
basins of Cawndilla and Minandichi. My object, therefore, in 
the present excursion, was as much to discover the means by 
which to advance the party to the N.W., and so to remove it 
from a populous neighbourhood, as to examine the country. 
Although we were obliged to dig wells in the lower part of the 
