ACROSS AUSTRALIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15056, 27 July 1912, Page 4 (Supplement)

ACROSS AUSTRALIA.

THE GREAT DEAD HEART OF THE

CONTINENT.

"Across Ai'STEalia," by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen (Macmillan and Co., London), is a book which in curiously prosaic scientific fashion tells of wonderful things, of the great dead heart of the Australian continent, of the bare stumps of once gigantic mountains, giving cycles ago rushing rivers, glacier-fed slopes, of tropical vegetation, abundant life to a country now empty and desolate. The author writes but little of geology, and yet in his rare phrases he shows the history of ancient gorges cut when the world was young, wandering by unaccountable routes through the plutonic bases of worn-out ranges. Sedimentary rocks which onco crowned the granites and gave life to forests and birth to running streams have crumbled to desert, dust. The- main, portion of the book deals with the survivals of ancient forms of life, and with the curiously uninteresting beliefs and religious ceremonies of the aboriginal : blackspoor savages of a lamentably poor '■;:-;": - stone age. Among many most interesting bits of information are : — The Water-holding Frog. We had previously heard of a waterholding frog, and were very anxious to .make its personal acquaintance. One day ' - during the dry season we came to a small. day-pan bordered with withered shrubs.' The ground was traversed by wide cracks, / and covered with curled-tip, glistening •■.■-'■■■'•■ :■■"','■'•■'.■-. ■■ ■ - : ---: ! '"' "A ■'■;■•;'.'•',.'.■.■■;■--V \ : -:,-'Z ■k:' : iiU / i^'''r'^

flakes of-clav. It looked about the most, unlikely snot imaginable m which to search'for'frogs, as there was not a crop of surface water or anything moist within roanv miles. However, as soon as we asked our native guide to find a frog, lie started to search about on the margin of the clay-pan, and in a minute or two pointed" out some indistinct marks on the hard clav at the root of one of the bushes. These, he told us, were made by a. frog, though it would require a naturalist as skilled as a native, first of all to find them, and then to recognise them as made bv a fro?. The ground was as hard as a rock, and we had to cut it away with a hatchet, but. sure enough, about a foot below the surface, we came upon a little spherical chamber, about three inches in diameter, in which lay a-curty yellow frog. Its body was shaped like an orange, sniierical and puffed out. with its hesd and" legs drawn up so as to occupy as little room as possible. The walls ot its burrow -were moist and slimy, and the animal was fast asleep with the lower eyelids drawn up so tightly over the eyes that the natives assured us that it was quite blind. Mussels and Crabs.

Wherever the banks of the creeks were composed of earth which is not too sandy, fresh-water mussels were abundant; in fact, the banks of some of the water-holes were strewn with shells which had been broken open by the natives, who find them by the very simple method of feeling tor them with "their toes in the muddy water. The mussels plough their way down into the bed of the creek as the water dries up. They are not met with in the clay-pans, but* onlv in the water-holes along the more or "less'regular creeks, and tho same is true of the crabs and crayfish. It must of course alwavs be remembered that a creek only runs for a very short timeseldom for more than two or three daysafter a rainfall, and that for months at a time it is perfectly dry. . Of all places in which to meet with a true crab, sidling away to its hole, the drv Steppe lands of Central Australia are about the most unlikely and surprising. One's ideas of crabs are so bound up with the 'sea-shore that we were astonished, when walking one day along the bank of a waterhole in the Stevenson Creek, to see a crab making for its hole in the muddy bank. Later on we found that the same crab is widely distributed over the Central area, the most northern spot at which we found it being a waterhole in the Stirling Creek, a hundred miles.to the neat* of the Macdonnell Ranges, and doubtless it extends still further northward in the interior. It is apparently the same form, Thelphusa. transversa, which has been recorded from Gape York in the north-east of Australia, arid its presence in the centre "of the continent points back to a time when there was a great inland sea. The crab' has evidenly been left behind, and has adapted itself, not only to fresh-water life, but; to conditions which would, at first sight, appear to be almost fatal to crab-life. It makes a burrow in the bank of a creek in which it can retain water sufficient to keep itself moist and to tide over months of drought.