INTERIOR OF AUSTRALIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18612, 21 July 1922, Page 6

INTERIOR OF AUSTRALIA

A SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION. (Prom Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, July 12. Interesting discoveries were - made iby the members of a scientific research expedition which has just returned from the interior of Australia, Tho expedition was led by Dr George Home, of Melbourne. More than 400 photographs were taken, and 4000 ft of film was devoted to a record of natives and their mode of living, birds, and scenery. Among tho specimens Dr Home brought back with him was a tooth of a diprotodon. If tho deceased diprotodon were built on a scale proportionate to its tooth, it must have been, a gigantic animal. Tho partilocated the skeletons of at least four dipro; todons. It did not try to collect them, as it had no means of treating tho bones, which would crumble if untreated. So tho party covered them with clay mud and left them. Tho natives, with a complete disregard of the fascination that diprotodons have for tho scientist, are in the habit of testing tho tensile strength of tho monster’s bones. Dr Homo said that in an area approximating 400 miles by 400 miles, there were only 131 white inhabitants, including 50 “floaters” —temsters and nomads generally. The area, extended from tho Queensland border to the Cooper. The parly brought back to Melbourne many interesting specimens, and it will take some time to classify them and develop tho photographs and Idnema films.