138 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



sources being in the ranges between Goulburn and Bathurst. This stream is hardly at 

 all navigable, but it drains a basin of twenty-seven thousand square miles. 



The Darling drains the western rain-fall from Bathurst to the northern boundary of 

 the colony. Its principal tributaries the Bogan, the Macquarie and the Castlereagh run 

 for a considerable distance north-west, and this greatly puzzled the early explorers, who 

 thought they had found the sources of some river that would empty itself on the 

 northern coast, and it was no little disappointment to find that all these streams 

 converged into the channel of the Darling, running to the south-west. The general 

 system of the western water-shed, therefore, roughly resembles the shape of an outspread 

 hand, the wrist being the outlet and the fingers the great feeders. All these branches 

 have picturesque reaches at the beginning, where they are falling from the hills ; but 

 once out upon the plains they have but few tributaries, and they zig-zag slowly across 

 the level country, their course being generally marked by a thin fringe of stunted gum- 

 trees. They are welcome enough to the thirsty traveller, and the water-frontages are 

 highly prized by stock-owners, but they present little to charm an artist's eye. When the 

 waters are up there is something picturesque in the steam-boats puffing along through 

 the gum-tree groves with tremendous noise and stir; by day darkening the^soft blue of 

 the sky with smoke, and by night belching forth meteoric showers of sparks from their 

 funnels, and throwing long rays from their powerful lamps into the weird and silent 

 darkness of the forest that fringes the river's banks. Sometimes the waters are high 

 enough for these steamers to disregard the channel and, cutting off the bends, to pass 

 over the fallen tree-tops and sunken logs ; but in ordinary seasons the navigation is 

 most tortuous, and the risk of empalement on some of the innumerable snags that lie 

 hidden in the channel is not inconsiderable. Along the plains the red-gum is the prin- 

 cipal river timber. On some rich flats, where the overflow has carried seeds, the 

 marginal strip broadens to a river-side forest, in which some charming vistas and natural 

 avenues may be found, the trees tall and well-crowned with dark-green foliage, but a 

 few varieties of wattle are almost the only undergrowth. In the summer of a dry 

 season the outlook over all the western country is monotonous in the extreme. Then 

 the great rivers are shrunk to puny streams, and a man may wade across the Darling, 

 or swim across the Murray in half a dozen strokes ; then the tributaries on the plains 

 and back-blocks have ceased to run, the back-water creeks are covered with a brittle gauze 

 of marsh-film, their courses being marked by only a fringe of stunted box-trees, and their 

 disused channels shewn by patches of bare sand or shingle, hot as the desert floor. 



On the eastern water-shed the character of the rivers is altogether different. Some 

 of them are short, and make a straight and quick descent to the coast, their velocity 

 being checked when they reach the narrow strip of plain, where they often form lagoons 

 closed in by a sand-bar, through which, when their torrents are swollen, they force a 

 passage to the sea. The smaller streams to the north of Cape Howe are all very 

 much of the same character mountain torrents in wet weather, disconnected pools in 

 dry, but nearly all watering a rich though narrow plain before their course is finished. 

 The principal river to the south of Sydney is the Shoalhaven, which for a considerable 

 distance runs northward, being forced in that direction by the secondary coast-range ; 

 but it turns to the east in the latitude of Goulburn, and cuts its way to the sea after a 



