June.j Hall, Some Notes on the Gippsland Lakes. 31 



SOME NOTES ON THE GIPPSLAND LAKES. 



(With Map.) 

 By T. S. Hall, M.A., D.Sc. 



{Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, qth Feb., 1914.) 

 Early in January of the present year I paid a long-promised 

 visit to the Gippsland Lakes. The outward trip was made 

 via Bairnsdale, whence a small steamer runs down the Mitchell 

 and so to Cunninghame, which is close to the new, or artificial, 

 entrance to the lakes from the sea. The length of the steamer 

 route is 25 miles. On the return journey I went by another 

 steamer along the whole length of the lakes and up the Latrobe 

 and Thomson Rivers to Sale, a distance of 75 miles. A week 

 was spent at Cunninghame, and from here a few short ex- 

 cursions were made. Some six years ago I went to Buchan 

 by coach from Bairnsdale, passing through Bruthen, and some 

 of the observations made on that trip are referred to. 



The mode of formation of the lakes appears to be quite 

 generally recognized, although nothing much seems to have 

 been written on the subject till Professor J. W. Gregory pub- 

 lished his " Geography of Victoria" in 1903. To this reference 

 will be made later. Lakes King and Wellington are the remains 

 of the estuaries of the Rivers Tambo, Mitchell, and Latrobe, 

 and a few other smaller streams. The estuaries, which formed 

 considerable indentations in the coast-hne, have been cut off 

 from the sea by a long and comparatively narrow rampart of 

 sand, which forms the Ninety-mile Beach. This appears to 

 have no definite topographical beginning or end, but a con- 

 tinuous sandy beach, with dunes and impounded swamps and 

 lakes, stretches from Corner Inlet (where it begins with Snake 

 Island) as far as Lake Tyers. Eastward of this there are many 

 isolated similar tracts where swamps and lakes have been cut 

 off from the sea by dunes, the most easterly of all being Malla- 

 coota Inlet, near Cape Howe. 



Similar conditions occur on the western end of our State 

 coast-line. The mouth of the Glenelg is closed, as a rule, and 

 a long line of swamps runs inside the dunes as far, I believe, 

 as Cape Bridgewater. East of Portland the Narrawong Beach 

 is of a similar character, and the same conditions prevail as 

 far as Warrnambool, with the intermission of the basalt outcrop 

 at Port Fairy. East of Warrnambool the same features are 

 repeated, but on a small scale, where the mouths of the rivers 

 are blocked and the estuaries are either lagoons or swamps, 

 as at Curdie's Inlet, the rivers Gellibrand, Aire, Burrum, Airey's 

 Creek, and the Barwon, where the Connewarre Lakes are fairly 

 large (3,800 acres). Port Philhp has had its opening con- 

 stricted by similar causes, and Anderson's Inlet and Shallow 

 Inlet have arisen from the same drifting of sand in an easterly 

 direction. 



