THE TOWNS OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 267 



always tedious ; nor is there much charm of scenery to break" the monotony. The fringe 

 of eucalyptus is almost continuous, and on the banks beyond spread out the plains in 

 a good season green with innumerable herbs and luxuriant grass, and in time of drought 

 covered with brown, gray, or red dust, and dotted with bleaching bones. Some distance 

 north of Wilcannia is the little settlement of Louth a purely pastoral village, deriving 

 all its importance from the stock-traffic, and the enterprise of the few inhabitants who 

 have shown what the soil is capable of when treated to a little judicious irrigation. 



North of Louth is Bourke, the one historic and characteristic township of the great 

 inland River. Bourke has an Australian name and fame. It is to the pastoral life what 

 Ballarat is to the mining. The typical drover, squatter, shepherd, stock-man, is as 

 thoroughly identified with the one as the old-time digger with the other, and though in 

 these times a commonplace conventionalism tends to make men more and more alike, 

 the men who pass through Bourke up and down, or who linger there for a holiday, 

 despite the superior charms of the coastal towns, so easily accessible by railway, have 

 many characteristics and peculiarities of their own. The town is built on a black flat 

 on the left or southern ' bank of the River a dead level that stretches away to the 

 horizon, with a few poor clumps of trees to diversify its bleak and shapeless aspect. 

 Thirty miles north-east is the remarkable Mount Oxley, rising to the height of seven 

 hundred feet sheer from the plain, its treeless ridge straight as a roof-line. Red 

 soil is found on the skirts of the black plain, marking the limit of past overflows, for 

 the River now very rarely rises to the streets of the town. Salt and cotton bush, and 

 many varieties of river-bank herbage cresses, spinifex, warrigal cabbage, Darling peas and 

 native tobacco grow freely over all the flat, and intrude themselves as familiar weeds 

 in the gardens and streets and the enclosures of the railway. All the great buildings 

 churches, hospitals, schools, banks and principal hotels are of brick ; the more humble 



% 



establishments and the cottages are of galvanized iron, sawn pine, or the various materials 

 ingeniously applied to back-block architecture. The streets are broad, but unmetalled. In 

 a dry hot day of midsummer black dust as fine as flour blows along them. In a 

 wet day of winter the sticky mud clings to all things with which it comes in contact 

 boot-soles, buggy-wheels, the hoofs of horses. The traveller finds himself in a few 

 minutes walking in clogs, so quickly does the plastic mass grow beneath him. The 

 experienced resident keeps within doors, holding fast to the common creed that there 

 was never yet so much hurry in Bourke that a man need go outside when it rained. 

 About once in a quarter of a century there is a flood, when the waters are four feet 

 deep in all the lower parts of the town. This, however, is not due to the local rain- 

 fall, but to the swollen streams that roll clown from the western slopes of the Queens- 

 land main ranLre and converge above the town. 



o o 



There are not many wet clays in Bourke. Winter months bring occasionally 

 piercing winds, the thermometer standing at fifty degrees. Summer is unmistakably hot ; 

 the mercury, even in the shade, often ranging from a hundred and ten to a hundred 

 and twenty-five degrees. It is not the place in which a man favoured with a choice 

 would choose for a residence, and yet the regular inhabitants, with the frequent visitors, 

 seem to live with tolerable comfort and health, though in a way of their own. From 

 the balcony of either of the large hotels by the River, where most of the life of the 



