ACROSS AUSTRALIA

Hokitika Guardian, 11 April 1929, Page 2

ACROSS AUSTRALIA

PERIL AND DISCOMORT.

PRESUMED LANDING PLACE.

The four airmen in the Southern Cross left the Richmond aerodrome, Sydney, at 10.50 a.m. on Saturday, .March 30. Since then only two wireless messages have actually been received from them. The first reached Sydney at 3 a.m. on Sunday. It stated that the flyers expected to reach Wyndham between 9 and 10 a.m. At 12.20 p.m. that day the second message from the airmen stated that their petrol was .running out and they were descending. It was reckoned that the airmen then were 150 miles from Wvndham, hut there was no certainity about it. There has been nothing further to throw light on how the landing was effected, Or where it took place. The assumption is that the flyers overflew "VVyndham and landed somewhere to the north-West of that township, probably about 130 miles distant. This news conveys to those unacquainted with the locality hut a ifaint impression of the -perils and discomforts which the party will have undergone before they are reseured. The country where they are presumed to have landed is described by Mr G. F. Parkes, of Auckland, who was in the region a few months ago. He says it is den sly wooded and hilly. There aie also long, barren stretches, where little vegetation exists, and animal and fethered life is entirely absent.

Apart from the risk of starvation (the fivers took food sufficient for only a few- meals), another danger, and not a remote one, lies in the fact that the natives of that portion of the continent are treacherous, and much more hostile to white men than those who inhabit other parts of Australia. Murders by the blacks on the northwest coast have been of frequent occurrence in recent years, the victims have included pearlers, cattlemen, and lonely prospectors. These blacks are tall and well-developed as a rule, many of them exceeding six feet in height. The country has been very little explored, and many of the natives have never seen a white man. Wyndham is the port of shipment of large numbers of cattle for the Fremantle and the Eastern trade, and Bteamers specially fitted up call at regular intervals to receive the cattle driven in from the big stations outback. The areas of these stations are many hundreds of square miles, and the boundary riders disappear from civilisation for months at a time.

Wyndham itself is an unimposing, ram-shackle place, at the head of Cambridge Gulf, 263 miles by sea, southwest of Darwin, and the white population would barely reach 50 in number. A not uncommon sight some years ago wa's a manacled procession of blacks brought in by the police from the int<3rior, charged with the crime of ki ing cattle. The Forrest River and Drysdale Rivor mission stations referred to in the cablegrams may belong to the Roman Catholic or Moravian missions, which have been established in the most out-of-the-way places in the far north. Years ago one such station was discovered on a most desolate part of the coast, far away from civilisation 1 To the west and south of the locality where the Southern Cross is supposed to have landed no settlement of any kind exists. Derby, the principal port north 6f Port Hedland, from which a West Australian Airways machine is reported to have left for Wyndham, is some hundreds of miles from the Drjsdale River mission station, and the intervening country is extremely barren and inhospitable.