Here, at Musgrave, is one of the telegraph line stations and there is just the one house, owned by "Uncle" Fred Shephard, who has done well and is about returned on the proceeds of his cattle raising. Incidentally, it is always a matter of mild amusement to me that so many of these back-country people have attained comparative wealth and yet are perfectly satisfied to live under such very primitive conditions. But, getting back to Musgrave, it is a change from the rest of the journey, which led through forty miles of the same, unremitting, dismal, scanty forest, over the same double carttrack in the sandy soil. There were occasional patches of slightly green grass on which grazed Uncle Fred's cattle; there were occasional outcroppings of rock and all the way along there were little holes and trenches dug by miners making sample holes. There was no water at all during the whole twenty miles, and that is a fair sample of all this part of the middle of the Peninsula. Our camp now is at the edge of a large open meadow and the forest has receded from us but I expect we shall be in it again tomorrow. Beside us is a stagnant pool smelling strongly of sulphur and that not only is providing us with our water in this camp but also supplies Uncle Fred and his household. We have crossed the dividing range, about 1 P.M., and are now on the eastern tside of the water shed, but well inland. We shall not see the ocean until we reach Cooktown, on the 31st. The Hann River, named after an explorer of the early 1900's, is one of the many streams and rivers which flow into Princess Charlotte Bay. It has running water all year and should produce a good drink, if nothing more. Sunday, 29 August 1948. Another of the same sort of day, one of blistering heat so great that Van is a bit upset by it, following a quite cold night. Our journey was about fifty miles and our lot one of anthills and puffs of dust; our destination, the Hann River, where I am writing, was reached about 1 P.M. after a start and continuous travel at 8 A.M. The forest is getting more and more sparse and the country drier and drier. We pass through great fields of anthills, mainly of three varieties - there are the tomb-stone like magnetic anthills, thin and wide and about four feet high on an average; they look like the tip of enormous table-knives stuck upright in the ground and are blue-grey in color. They get their name from the fact that almost in- variably their thin top edge runs in a north and south direction. The next most numerous are huge, cauliflower-like things, made from a light brown clay or mud, and the third consists of a single sharp spire of spike rising from the ground to a sharp point from three to five feet high. The double wheel tack threads between these things and as we come to a bare and dusty place it looks as though we were bursting bags of flower flour and tossing it behind us. The Hann is a narrow stream at present though all these small brooks and the hundreds of dry stream beds we have crossed, will run with water when the wet season starts in three or four months. It will be a great pleasure when we can look again on green grass but I am not quite sure when we shall do so. Tomorrow we reach Laura, after a sixty or seventy mile run and the next day the rain-motor takes us to Cooktown but I am sure there is no green grass there. My bruised heel is still quite painful and I shall not do much walking about today. I have been to a sort of lagoon, or wide pool opening off the river which I shall look at after dark, but it is only a few hundred yards away. Van has been lying down for the last hour but George and his boys have gone out with the traps and Len and his boy are out gathering their stuff. I shall have a bath, a shave and cedge a cup of tea from Joe.