Walter Goodfellow—A Collector on Melville Island 317


and you might move 20 miles and not know you had gone more than

one for all the change there is in the landscape. Around the coast,

green looking mangroves give a false impression of the interior, but

there is a strip down the west coast bordering on the Apsley Straits,

more dense and tropical looking, but elsewhere there is little to suggest

the tropics as most people picture them.


On arrival at the mission station I hired their schooner to take me

and my baggage some 50 odd miles along the south coast of Melville

to avoid having to walk that distance on foot, and from where I was

set down I walked 8 miles inland to camp. There are great numbers

of blacks on the island, but they have a bad reputation and they roam

from one camping site to another, as the last one gets too insanitary,

even for them, and game gets scarce too perhaps. They make no

habitations, and cultivate nothing whatever, just living on the game they

kill. They are treacherous and great thieves and generally useless.

The majority of both sexes are clothed as they were born. I got to

dislike them very much, and for my part (and many others agree with

me) I should rejoice to hear that the last black had died out in

Australia. They are annihilators of all game, and the fauna of the

country is so unique and wonderful, that personally I consider it far

more worthy of preservation than the “ abos ”.


At the time of my arrival two young white men were on the island

collecting snake skins and dingo scalps ; the latter for the Goverment

reward of seven and sixpence each. The snake business had slumped.

So neither stayed long after I got there, but within a few months the

blacks had brought them in over nine hundred large carpet Jyshors

alone, and yet during the few months I was there, I never came across

one. Such is my luck who love snakes, and yet I seldom meet them

wherever I go, while other people who loathe them seem always to be

running into them, or say they do. A man in Darwin who was said

to be a noted snake catcher promised to bring me “ mobs of them ”

but never brought one, and yet you hear the place is overrun with

them.


I made my camp close to the white men’s. I had met one of them

in Darwin, and he had walked all the way to the Apsley Straits to

meet me.



