Other members of Governor King's family laid the author under obligations by submitting to him copious manuscripts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The late Sir William Macarthur, of Camden Park, also gave him access to similar documents, and enriched their contents from the stores of his spacious memory during the author's visits to his house. In England, in 1882, the author examined original documents at the Record Office, which furnished no reason for shaking confidence in the King and Macarthur MSS, but, on the contrary, contained many proofs of their accuracy.
Some space has been devoted to records of the aboriginal tribes of Australia; and the author has endeavoured to weave into his narrative facts brought under his own knowledge in various parts of the continent. Some of the habits of the race he had striven to record in a rhymed legend (Moyarra) very many years ago. It is one of the pleasing reminiscences of a stay in London that the late Lord Bowen (one of Her Majesty's Judges, and the gifted translator of Virgil) assured him that the legend was "charming." The natives are chiefly mentioned in this Preface, however, in order to refer to a matter which ought to have been alluded to in the second chapter, but cannot now be inserted there as the printing has been completed.
The Australians had a method of communicating with their friends by means of lines graven on sticks despatched from tribe to tribe. The author's recollection of the method (after lapse of half a
effect." Paterson's opportunities of acquiring information were unsurpassed. Besides commanding the military, when he thus wrote, he had acted as Governor in 1794 and 1795; and after an absence on leave he returned to Sydney in November, 1799, in time to observe the effects of Hunter's incapacity.
