Sir Luke preferred the Blacks, and started the question of danger to white men in the out-districts.

How far had officialdom penetrated into the back blocks?
He understood that Mr McKeith had explored for the laying of a telegraph-line to the Big Bight.

Could Mr McKeith give him any information about all that?
McKeith explained again.

He had stopped a week, he said, at the last outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation.

The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks.