Amongst these, low
shrubs with grey-green leaves take root, and thrive and flourish
under the salt sea spray where other trees would die. Strange
plants, with pulpy leaves and brilliant flowers, send forth long
green lines, having no visible beginning or end, which cling to the
sand and weave over it a network of vegetation, binding together the
billowy dunes.
The beach is broken in places by narrow channels, through which the
tide rushes, and wanders in many currents among low mudbanks studded
with shellfish--the feeding grounds of ducks, and gulls, and swans;
and around a thousand islands whose soil has been woven together by
the roots of the spiky mangrove, or stunted tea-tree. Upon the muddy
flats, scarcely above the level of the water, the black swans build
their great circular nests, with long grass and roots compacted with
slime. Salt marshes and swamps, dotted with bunches of rough grass,
stretch away behind the hummocks. Here, towards the end of the
summer, the blacks used to reap their harvest of fat eels, which they
drew forth from the soft mud under the roots of the tussocks.
The country between the sea and the mountains was the
happy-hunting-ground of the natives before the arrival of the
ill-omened white-fellow. The inlets teemed with flathead, mullet,
perch, schnapper, oysters, and sharks, and also with innumerable
water-fowl.
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