English cottages, many of the ill effects of the rainy season would be avoided.
In the Moreton Bay district may be found many establishments containing all the luxuries of Europe elegant houses, gardens, libraries, music, pictures, and wives in Parisian bonnets.
Wide Bay, beyond Moreton Bay, and the boundary of the county of Stanley, is the last port of the colony of New South Wales : it receives the waters of the Mary Fitzroy River. The land is undulating, well timbered, covered with good grass, and suited for horned stock. Within the last five years a considerable number of stations have been formed there, and the country taken up in cattle runs for more than two hundred miles in the interior. In the 27th parallel of the Wide Bay District grows the bunya-bunya tree, a species of pine, often from seventeen to twenty feet in circumference, and upwards of one hundred feet in height, which once in three years yields a harvest of cones about a foot long and three quarters in diameter, containing seeds or kernels, which the natives from the most distant regions triennially journey to collect, roast, and eat, afterwards enjoying the relaxation of a little fighting.
Orders have been issued by the colonial government that no stations be planted and no stock run in this bunya-bunya country, which occupies a space of about fifty miles in length by ten in breadth. It will be difficult to enforce this order.
Dr. Leichardt, one of the scientific travellers who has, we fear, like Cunningham, Gilbert, and Kennedy, fallen a victim to his adventurous courage in an attempt to penetrate overland to Swan River, passed some time in the Moreton Bay district, preparing himself for the successful journey he afterwards made overland, in 1844, to Port Essington, in Northern Australia. In a letter addressed to Professor Owen, which is quoted in that eminent physiologist's "Report on the Extinct Mammals of Australia," read at the annual meeting of the British Association, July, 1845, and which accompanied a box of fossil bones from Darling Downs, he describes his life in terms which sound sadly and strangely affecting, now that, after succeeding in his first, he has perished in his second enterprise:—
"Living here as the bird lives who flies from tree to tree living on the kindness of a friend fond of my science, or on the hospitality of the settler and squatter with a little mare I travelled more than 2,500 miles, zigzag, from Newcastle to Wide Bay, being often my own groom, cook, washerwoman, geologist, and botanist at the same time; and I delighted in this life. When next you hear of me, it will be either that
