15/5/90.
Herewith, dear Mr. Macdonald, I send you the just received document;1 the second report, to which Mr. Forrest alludes, was not in the envelope, nor has it as yet come separately.2 I wrote him already some weeks ago, that it was quite useless to enquire at the coast, as the light-colored aborigine has his tribe near Warburton's track, and as the death-place of the four people was still very much farther inland.
How any miners could have ever gone so far into the central desert is difficult to comprehend.
Let me hope, that you feel better.
Regardfully your
Ferd. von Mueller
I have written to Mr. Krichauff, to learn whether the SA. Government (Survey Office) will give £250 for the map, should we be able to spend £500 in Central Austr and guarantee Camels, all Vict. money to be thus disbursed in South Australia.3
J. Forrest to M, 6 May 1890 (in this edition as 90-05-06a), concerning a report by Alexander McPhee of white men having perished inland from Lagrange Bay.
In his letter, Forrest reported that he had enclosed a copy of a report by the Telegraph Station Master at Lagrange Bay, WA.
Reference not fully identified, but at the meeting of the Council of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (Victorian Branch) on 9 April 1890, letters from David Lindsay and J. T. Sproul 'in reference to proposed expedition to connect Lake Macdonald to a point on the western coast' were read (Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (Victorian Branch), vol. 8, part 1 (1890), p. 26). The salt Lake Macdonald straddles the border of WA and NT, then administered by SA, at 23°30' S. Lindsay had in March 1889 written to the Society 'expressing his willingness to make further search for Leichhardt' (Transactions, vol. 7, part 1 (1889), p.14).
Please cite as “FVM-90-05-15,” in Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, edited by R.W. Home, Thomas A. Darragh, A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D.M. Sinkora†, J.H. Voigt† and Monika Wells accessed on