WALK OF 12,000 MILES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19144, 9 October 1925, Page 9

WALK OF 12,000 MILES.

ALL AROUND AUSTRALIA. RETURNED SOLDIER'S FEAT. [FROM OtTS OWN CORRESPONDENT, j SYDNEY, Oct. 1 Without any fanfare of trumpets, a young returned soldier named Laurence O'ShaugHnessy recently completed a walk round Australia. This pedestrian feat occupied two and a-quarter years, and involved covering 12,000 miles, all of which O'Shaughnessv travelled on foot with the exception of 200 miles, which he was compelled to ride on horseback, | iwing to an illness. Month in, month out, in wet weather and fine, Mr. O'Shaughnessy tramped on and on averaging for the whole of the time ovsr 15 miles a day. From the crowded streets of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane Mr. 'l'Shaughnessy passed to the lonely wastes of the far west of Queensland, of West Australia, and of the Northern Territory. League after league he plodded acros.*, the vest emptiness of the Nullabor Plain, where there is neither hill nor tree, neither lake nor stream, nothing but a rolling plain, covered with low bushes that seem to stretch into infinity. In the northern wilderness he walked right cut of the 20th century into the Stone Age, where the aborigines live still under the sway of their primitive superstitions, and keep the customs that have come down to them from *ht> days- when the world was young. Mr. O'Shaughnessv wore out eight pairs of boots in seeing his country as few others have seen it. He left Mel-tx-urne in May, 1923, and before he reached Sydney, he had discarded two pairs of boots as misfits, but in Sydney h,a had a pair made that carried him 4000 miles. Those boot's to him were more than mere hits of leather; they were real good friend'.!. When at last he discarded them on a West Australian cattle station, they were promptly picked up by a grinning nigger, and whan he last saw them they adorned the feet of an aborigine who wore nothing t else but a loin-cloth. v , In the north, Mr. O'Shaughnessy fraternised with friendly blacks, and ■ learned some of their customs. They explained to him the terrible custom of "bone singing,' which is part of the religion of some tribes. If an aborigine has a grudge against, another and wishes his enemy to die, he secures a piece of bone, generally the shin or arm bene of the human body. This is pointed at one end and stuck in the ground. He then walks round the bone, chanting his wish that his enemy will die. This is continued for some time. Other natives see him, and talk about his action. Gradually the nbws come 3 to the unwilling object of all this demonstration that someone is wishing his death. In a spirit of fatalism, he accepts the inevitable, refuses to eat, and gradually dies of grief and hunger., Many other strange things Mr. O'Shaughnessy saw and heard in the course of his Odysney, and perhaps after ail it is not so amazing that he should tell his friends thac, he would like to do the long journey again