Wednesday, 28 April 1948. Mosquitoes have been increasingly bad and the last few nights and we have all gone onto an anti- malaria course of some kind. Len sticks to quinine as atebrine seems to be harmful to him, George and I each take three atebrines on one day weekly, George taking one at each meal, and I taking all three at once, and Van has been taking atebrine since we reached Brisbane. As far as we can tell, the mosquitoes are not anopheles, but it would be foolish to take no form of protection. My big tree again yielded a harvest, ending up with a small python, I think, which I found asleep beneath the bark. I got his head with long for- ceps and stuck it in a bottle of alcohol, which seemed to numb the snake and I cramped the whole body into the bottle. The next thing to go in was a large centipede and I was amazed at the ferocity the creature showed. The snake was the nearest object and the centipede dug in on the snake with its jaws and all its many blue-green legs. As it expired from the alcohol, its grip loosened but when I took them both out later, the blood was trickling from the snake's neck and the marks of the centipede bite were evident and deep. In the afternoon I went again hoping to see the father and mother of the little python but was disappointed. Nothing showed at all and I guess I have milked that part of the forest dry. This evening George and Van have gone with young Dick Holland to do some hunting in the neighborhood of Dick's elder brother's saw-mill; we may be able to get mail out tomorrow so when I finish this I shall get some let- ters written and stamped. In about a week we shall move from here to Somerset, most likely, which sounds as though we are going to have a nice stay at some old English village. That is wrong - once upon a time one man lived at Somerset and the shack which he occupied is still standing, but that is all there is to Somerset. In fact, on the Peninsula north of the Jardine River, there are probably not more than a dozen white people, most of whom are members of Ginger Dick's family. The area is somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred square miles, which is a mighty small population. Here, at Lockerbie, apart from ourselves, there are Dick, his wife and one son. At R.I.P., there is another son who has a wife and one child but they have gone to T.I. as a second is imminent. The saw-mill houses another son and his wife and at Cape York telegraph station, there are four or five men. Cowal Creek may have a white Missioner but Mutee [illegible] Head has a black in charge. About a dozen is somewhere around right and the small islands between the mainland and T.I. are uninhabited. So far we do not have much knowledge of the Somerset camp but we under- stand there is a large freshwater lagoon inland from the coast. That sends streams of fresh water down to the ocean and will provide our water supply. Very likely our camp will be back about a quarter of a mile from the sea but what there is in the way of timber for tent erection, fire wood and so on, remains to be seen. Water, of course, is of prime importance as we have plenty of food and supplies, but the difference between a comfortable camp and a less comfortable one depends on many other things. There is a very pleasing feeling of accomplishment now, which was entire- ly absent while we were at Cairns. We visited many places while there but al- ways we knew that the job was still ahead. Now we can say, when we leave Locker- ie that that part of the job has been done. A week or ten days at Somerset, the same period in one other place at the Tip, and then the first of our three main camps will have been completed and a quarter of the job done. That really does give some satisfaction. We shall have about this length of time at the Cooktown district, the last of the three camps and the length of time needed for the Iron Range and Portland Roads is our chief uncertainty.