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AUSTRALIAN PICTURES. 



the city, and the many fair buildings. We shall not find another such town 

 as Bathurst, though country fair enough is beneath us by Blayney and 

 Orange, and southward thence through many villages and little mining 

 towns to Forbes. And almost due north to the Wellington valley, and out 

 to Dubbo, which is the gate of the great pastures, the country is of the 

 same character. 



On leaving Dubbo we reach the magnificent distances of Australia, the 

 land of the mirage and the great drought, the land of marvellous flocks and 

 herds. There on the vast bush plain or amongst the box forest are great 

 hosts of cattle, one or two or three thousand head, already six or nine 

 months on the road, hoping to make the port or the trucking station in three 

 months more. Strange men are with them, white as to colour — as white in 

 pluck and endurance, but as uncivilised as the one or two trackers who watch 

 the horses. In this region during the bad seasons you cross bare and bone- 

 strewn plains. At a wretched homestead you may find a man in the lowest 

 deep of despair. Well-to-do a couple of years ago, hoping to be rich before 

 the decade had closed, he is lord now of twenty thousand skeletons lying 

 upon the soil, which looks as if indeed cursed, and so effectively that it 

 will never bear grass or herb again. You may see river-beds of baked 

 mud, and glistening veins of sand that once were running creeks. Here grow 

 brigalow and nulga, gaunt and weird as the dragon-tree of the Soudan. 

 Hundreds of miles stretches this dreary land, the Lachlan winding through it 

 from east to west, the least significant stream in a dry or ordinary season 

 that ever served as the watercourse for so broad a land. 



Out in its centre lies a village, Cohan, grown about a mountain of 

 copper, and along the Darling are other villages, Bourke, Bremoroma, 

 Welcanna, Wentworth, lingering on when no rain falls, and blossoming with 

 a dripping month as rapidly almost as the herbage of the black flats. I 

 never saw anything beautiful in them except the self-devotion of some few 

 good women who shine as stars amongst the general blackness. But when 

 the rain has fallen, particularly in the pleasant winter after a genial autumn, 

 it cannot be said that the land lacks beauty. I remember winter days a 

 hundred miles north and south from the Darling river at Bourke, when the 

 face of nature seemed to shine in open placid beauty and to break into the 

 tenderest imaginable smile with each dying day ; mornings in June, when, 

 awakened by the glowing log to see the flush of dawn through an oak 

 hut or over a pine-ridge that seemed to rise mysteriously with the sun, and, 

 as though actually molten down by the increasing heat, to vanish utterly in 

 the full glow of day. There was no painful mockery in the mirage that 

 hung at noon on the horizon, with its flat-crowned trees rooted apparently in 

 the still blue water — for by any clump of broad-leaved colane or drooping 

 myall there was water in abundance, water clear and cool in every hollow ; 

 and grass, herbage and flowers knee-deep over all the land, when the spotted 



