A USTRALASIA ILL USTRA TED. 



of water bearing the name of Little Corangamite, but this is perfectly fresh. Indeed, 

 nothing can be more capricious than these variations of quality throughout the whole of 

 the Western 'District ; and in the centre of one salt-water reservoir, it is said, there wells 

 up a strong spring of the pure fresh element, so icily cold that to swim across it is 

 almost certain death. Hence, perhaps, the aboriginal tradition that this lake (GnotuK) 

 was the abode o'f an evil spirit, who took a malignant pleasure in seizing upon the 

 strongest swimmers, and dragging them, "through caverns measureless to man, down to a 



sunless sea." 



In the north-western portion of the colony there is a chain of fresh-water lakes 

 formed by the expansion of the River Wimmera, over an extensive but extremely shallow 

 depression, embracing, in the case of Lake Hindmarsh, an area of thirty thousand acres, 





LAKE HINDMARSH. 

 By Ellis Rowan. 



and in that of Lake Albacutya thirteen thousand acres. The River, taking its rise among 

 the Pyrenees, and augmented by affluents from the Grampians, flows in a northerly 

 direction for a distance of something like a hundred miles, feeding the two lakes we 

 have mentioned, and then disappearing in the sandy plains which stretch away to the 

 Murray. The evaporation which takes place in such a hot and arid region is enormous, 

 and is of course all the greater and more rapid by reason of the broad surface exposed 

 to the action of the sun's rays at the two points named. In seasons of drought Lakes 

 Hindmarsh and Albacutya are little better than geographical expressions, for nothing is 

 to be seen of either but a huge marsh, with, perhaps, a thin and intermittent thread of 

 water crawling deviously through its centre. 



In point of magnitude Lake Tyrrell ranks second to Lake Corangamite, covering 

 as it does an area of forty-two thousand six hundred acres. It lies sixty miles to the 

 north-west of Lake Albacutya, in a very similar country, densely-covered by the malice 



