partial to locust and wild catty. And yet they were generally understood to be labelled “not dangerous” unless they hit something. There was, of course, an occasional overgrown specimen which might not be quite so handy or harmless about the place. For instance, there is the backblocker [one who lives in the outback], who, coming home in the dusk, saw and fired at, what he took to be a wild turkey flying low, and found when it landed almost in the door of his little grey home in the bush that it was a broken-winged and very indignant snake.
They both spent a wildly wakeful night. Another early pioneer, gun in hand, in broad daylight, saw rapidly approaching overhead, and mostly all head, some remarkable monster, which he would have mistaken for an aeroplane had those innovations been about in those days. As the whirring wings passed overhead, he shut his eyes and fired, and brought down a most fearsome-looking creature with the head of a shark and the slimy winged body of a snake, which on closer inspection it proved to be. The serpent had evidently undertaken—for a wager maybe, or maybe only for a meal—to swallow a full-grown lizard of the Jewish persuasion, and had succeeded in getting the brute down all but the head, which was unusually large, and ornamented with frills and whiskers, some of which had apparently caught in the snake’s teeth, and so in all probability saved both their heads.
And this is the only authentic local instance of a lizard flying, although there is not the slightest doubt that they could do so if they wanted to. The lizard is, how ever, more of a ground bird, and seems quite content to make haste
