A I r S TK. I /..I AY- / //. /. f "V 77v'. / TED. 



live mili-s on. and a thousand feet down from Orange, is the mining village of Iron- 

 harks, and twenty-one miles farther, the town of Wellington. On either side of the 

 line farms have been established ; in dry years the crop is a failure, but in a good 

 season the M)il is wonderfully prolific, though too often even plentiful rains have their 

 troubles for the farmer, who sees his hay, oats or wheat beaten down by a heavy 

 storm ju^t as he begins to count on an abundant compensation for all his losses during 

 the years of drought. Much of the soil is decomposed trap, over-lying the limestone 

 and granite at the base of the hills, while the rich alluvial deposits brought down by 

 the Macquarie and the Hell Rivers cover all the flats. The town is at the junction of 

 the two streams, and is built on the spot where an outpost of the earliest pastoral 

 system was established more than half a century ago. Agriculture comes quite up to 

 the town, the wheat-fields lying almost at the doors of the stores and mills. The hills, 

 which are the farthest-extending feet of the westerly-reaching spurs of the Great 

 Divide, come down almost to the river's bank in lightly-wooded knolls and open braes, 

 above which rise craggy and boulder-strewn slopes, with an occasional cone suggestive 

 of the source of the fertilizing trap-rock. The foliage of these hills is more varied than 

 is usual in the Australian bush. In the caverns and ravines the geologist finds a field 

 for endless research, for long before the human interest of the world began, into these 

 limestone caves came those monstrous beasts whose proportions to the animals of to-day 

 are as those of the sons of Anak to pigmies. The tooth of a diprotodon has been found 

 there with some fragmentary bones of an echidna whose complete bulk must have been 

 beyond that of any of his tribe we know to-day, as much as the New Zealand moa 

 surpasses that quaint relic of his genus, the aptcryx and a bone of an old-world 

 marsupial, which Professor Owen pronounces to have been of the lion species. There 

 was large life in Australia in the days when creatures such as these came clown into 

 the mountain-caverns to die. Jungle and forest-growths, rivers rolling through broad 

 savannahs prevailed then where now is sometimes seen but the dust of drought, and 

 the marsh-film of meagre streams. 



The buildings of Wellington are substantial and comfortable, rather than beautiful ; 

 they are all of brick, and of that deep-red tint to which most of the inland clays seem 

 to burn. The hotels are broad-verandahed and cool, the churches roomy and sombre in 

 aspect, the banks anil insurance offices somewhat ornate and metropolitan in style, and 

 the stores generally of the old colonial order. Lying grouped in the valley amid the 

 trees by the River's edge and the rich foliage of orchards and gardens, they form a 

 charming picture a pleasing head and crown to the valley which stretches on inland 

 for many a mile. The railway crosses the river by a bridge, the foundations of which 

 were laid with difficulty, as the engineers had to pierce an enormous stratum of drift 

 an indication of an old geologic age. Beyond the town are flat patches of rich green corn, 

 acres of tobacco-plant, and breadths of wheat on a larger scale of fanning than is generally 

 i in the colony. At Mary vale, twelve miles from Wellington, there are farms of a 

 thousand and twelve hundred acres all under cultivation, and despite continual droughts, and 

 occasional losses through heavy rain-storms, the farmers are prosperous and hopeful. With 

 intervals of quart/ and granite country, with the usual clothing of stunted forest and scant 

 herbage, the good soil runs right down the Macquarie to Dubbo, thirty miles to the north-west. 



