"In all my excursions I was accompanied by Blacks. An encampment of natives lay at about half a mile from the shore; the camp was a small one, and composed of the remnants of three tribes. There were 21 natives in this camp when I visited it early one morning in search of a guide, before daybreak, before the Blacks were awake. Of these 21, about six were adult males, one of whom was employed at the water police station during the day time; there were four boys of from ten to fourteen years, two young girls, two old women, two middle-aged women, and the remainder were young women.One of the old women was the mother of Longway, who acted as my guide, and who had a son about ten years old. The Blacks were mostly of the Gudang tribe, a vocabulary of the language of which is given in the Appendix to MacGillivray’s “Voyage of the ‘Rattlesnake.’” The natives were in a lower condition than I had expected. Their camp consisted of an irregularly oval space concealed in the bushes, at some distance from one of the paths through the forest. In the centre were low heaps of wood ashes with fire-sticks smouldering on them. All around was a shallow groove or depression, caused partly by the constant lying and sitting of the Blacks in it, partly by the gradual accumulation of ashes inside, and the casting of these and other refuse immediately outside it. On the outer side of this groove or form large leaves of a Fan Palm were here and there stuck up at an angle so as to form a shelter, under which the Blacks huddled together at night to sleep.A camp of this shape with a slight mound inside, and a bank outside, formed involuntarily by primitive man, may have given the first idea of the mound, the ditch, and rampart. The large amount of wood-ashes accumulated in such a camp, accounts for their occurrence in such large quantities in kitchen-middens, where camping must have been in the same style. A good many shells brought from the shore lay here and there about the camp.There were besides in the neighbourhood remains of shelters of the common Australian form, long huts made of bushy branches set at an angle to meet one another above, and partially covered with palm-leaves and grass; these the Blacks used occasionally.In the daytime the young women and the men were usually away searching for food, but two miserable old women, reduced nearly to skeletons, but with protuberant stomachs, with sores on their bodies and no clothing but a narrow bit of dirty mat, were always to be seen sitting huddled up in the camp. These hags looked up at a visitor with an apparently meaningless stare, but only to see if any tobacco or biscuit were going to be given them; they exhibited no curiosity, but only scratched themselves now and then with a pointed stick.The younger women had all of them a piece of some European stuff round their loins. Some of the men had tattered shirts, but one, who acted as my guide, was invariably absolutely without clothing, as was his son, who always accompanied him. The only property to be seen about the camp were a few baskets of plaited grass, in the making of which the old women were sometimes engaged, and which were used by the gins for collecting food in. Two large Cymbium shells, with the core smashed out, had been used also to hold food or water, but were now replaced for the latter purpose by square gin bottles, of which there were plenty lying about the camp, brought from the settlement."