i 3 4 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



Through the western gorges of the Liverpool Range, Allan Cunningham, botanist 

 and explorer, found the road northward which he named the Pandora Pass. The railway 

 from Newcastle to the north country climbs the mountains here, making a bold sweep 

 up their face and, piercing the ridge with a tunnel, coming out on the Liverpool Plains. 

 From this point the range runs north, forming a fairly broad plateau, over large areas 

 of which the soil is rich with the decomposition of the intrusive trap-rock, and thus is 

 reached the New England Range, forming the vast northern table-land. The average 

 elevation of this portion of the Great Divide is three thousand five hundred feet, and 

 its highest point, the renowned Ben Lomond, looks down from an altitude of five 

 thousand feet. A lateral spur is the Macpherson Range, which runs east to Point 

 Danger and culminates in Mount Lindsay, with a height of seven hundred feet above 

 that of Ben Lomond in the main range. This great table-land to the north of the 

 Liverpool mountain chain grows wheat in abundance, and supports a numerous and 

 increasing population, who find health and wealth on its well-watered, breezy surface. 

 Two hundred miles it stretches, not without patches of romantic beauty and glimpses of 

 grandeur in mountain and in valley. On its seaward slopes there is wildness enough, 

 as those settlers discovered who sought a more direct outlet to the sea than that 

 through Newcastle. 



Some of the grandest mountains are set in the extreme north-eastern corner of the 

 colony. They are very little known, and many of them may never have been ascended ; 

 but from the tropical fringe of the sugar-lands, or the bold headland of Point Danger, 

 to the magnificent height of Mount Lindsay, they are beautiful in form and in foliage 

 beyond all other hills of the colony. Mount Lindsay, with its castellated summit, may 

 well be described as the giant warder of our northern frontier. Seen from the heights 

 above Casino, or from the great table-land, his grim front rises through the forests a 

 sheer crag, a thousand feet in height, robed with foliage, and with his wet rocky 

 helmet flashing jewel-like in the sun. 



The cradles of some of the greatest Australian waters are about these northern 

 mountains. Here spring brooks which, later on, combine with others to form the great 

 Darling. Westward they all flow from the mountain slopes ; and on what a long and 

 marvellous journey they go out on to the broad western plains, down the tortuous 

 courses of the Darling and the Murray till they find the sea on the southern coast ! 

 And the waters of the eastern slopes, what will they discover ? They see such abrupt 

 contrasts, such varieties of vegetation, as no other Australian waters are privileged to 

 see. Their birthplace is in the highlands, amongst shrubs of poor and wintry growth ; 

 but in a few miles they come down to warm and fertile dales, through which they 

 gleam and sparkle on their journey to the sea, putting a fringe about the robe of the 

 Big Divide which in its richness is unapproached by any other forest of the Continent. 

 The greatest breadth of this tropical verdure, which bears the prosaic and misleading 

 name of the Big Scrub, spreads itself about those feet of the mountains which come 

 down to the sea by the little towns of the Richmond River. 



At Mount Lindsay ends the New South Wales portion of the mountain chain. The 

 cordillera, running generally parallel with the direction of the coast, comprises either in 

 its principal range, or in its lateral spurs, all the great mountains, the water-gathering or 



