148 Hardy, The Mallee : Ouyen to Pinnavoo. lyS^'-^^y^ 



THE MALLEE : OUYEN TO PINNAROO. 

 Botanical Notes. 

 By a. D. Hardy, F.L.S., State Forests Department, Melbourne. 

 {Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, 14th July, 191 3). 

 Several geographical descriptions of the Mallee have been 

 published in the Victorian Naturalist, and an excellent general 

 survey may be read in a Parliamentary paper by Mr. Stuart 

 Murray, late Chief Engineer of the Water Supply Department. 

 But, in order that this paper may be " self-contained," and 

 that the part to be particularly noticed may be better located, 

 the following brief sketch may not be deemed superfluous. 



The accompanying map, which I have compiled from my 

 field-notes and data obtained from various articles in the 

 Victorian Naturalist, has, through the courtesy of the Surveyor- 

 General (Mr. J. M. Reed, LS.O.), been printed by the Lands 

 Department. For the lines of equal rainfall and the line 

 indicating the probable northern limit of usable water I am 

 indebted to Mr. A. S. Kenyon, C.E., of the State Rivers and 

 Water Supply Commission. Any general notes on vegetation 

 away from areas shown as naturalists' localities have been 

 obtained after much sorting of vernaculars used by Lands 

 Department surveyors (chiefly Messrs. Urbahns, Turner, 

 Harvey, Poole, Tobin, and Breen), and from information and 

 specimens supplied by Mr. Perry, the State Forest officer for 

 the Northern Mallee. A reference to the symbols employed in 

 the map will be found accompanying the description of plate, 

 &c. 



Not to be too precise in a matter with which we are, for the 

 moment, only indirectly concerned, we may say that the Mallee 

 country is the large north-western corner of Victoria cut off 

 by an imaginary line drawn from Swan Hill, on the Murray 

 River, south-westerly to the South Australian border ; and an 

 area which extends beyond the Murray into New South Wales 

 and into South Australia. Physiographers have shown that 

 this tract is the raised bed of a sea or great estuary into which 

 flowed rivers such as the Darling, Lachlan, Murrumbidgee, 

 Murray, and Loddon, which now, confluent in full season, 

 reach the sea by the channel of the lower Murray — these from 

 the north and east chiefly ; but from the Grampians and 

 Pyrenees highlands on the south flow the Wimmera, the 

 Yarriambiack, Dunmunkle, Avon, and Avoca — streams of 

 which only the last (and that in good rainy season) is con- 

 tinuous, the others ending in lakes, swamps, or marshes. 

 The Wimmera flows into Lake Hindmarsh, and, in 

 good season, out of it northerly as Outlet Creek and into 

 Lake Albacutya, and again northerly out of this still as Outlet 



