CHAPTEE XXXIII. 
THE DESERT SANDSTONE FORMATION. 
(UPPEE CEETACEOUS.) 
This great formation must at one time have covered at least tliree-fourths of the 
Colony of Queensland, although its denuded remains now occupy less than the twentieth 
part of the area over which it originally extended. After the Rolling Downs Formation 
had been laid down in the comparatively narrow sea which connected the Gulf of 
Carpentaria with the Great Australian Bight, and converted the Australian area into 
two islands, a considerable upheaval toot place. The denudation of the Rolling Downs 
Formation followed, and must have gone on for some time. Unequal movements of 
depression then brought about lacustrine conditions on portions of the now uplifted 
bottom of the old deep-sea strait, and in other portions permitted of the admission of 
the waters of the ocean. Finally, a general upheaval placed the deposits of the period 
just concluded in nearly the positions in which we now find them. 
In the southern portion of the Colony a good deal of the Desert Sandstone may be 
seen without leaving the Southern and AFestern Railway. It begins first to arrest the 
attention of the traveller to the west of Hodgson, in the low table tops of Mount Abun- 
dance, near Brinsop Railway Station (338 miles). The station is 1,170 feet above the sea, 
and the base of the sandstone tableland is not much above that altitude. The railway cuts 
through a low sandstone tableland, about the same altitude, just before reaching Amby 
Station, and passes to the south of another on the opposite or west bank of Amby Creek. 
South of Mitchell Station ( 1,104 feet), another sandstone tableland is passed on the north. 
Between Womallilla and Mungall alia Stations (400 miles) the line cuts through another 
tableland which stretches for a considerable distance to north and south.* At Dulby- 
dilla (410 miles) the line surmounts the divide between the Culgoa and W arrego Rivers, 
which is capped by a table of Desert Sandstone about two hundred and eighty feet in 
total thickness, the upper portion being red, gritty, ferruginous, and the lower portion 
felspathic sandstone. The base of the sandstone is only a little above the level of 
Dulbydilla Railway Station (1,443 feet). One standing on the top of the range near 
Dulbydilla, and looking north and east, can see the Desert Sandstone forming an almost 
continuous line of cliffs enclosing, like a frame, the heads of the Culgoa River, and 
prolonged eastward along the summit of the so-called "Great Dividing Range” between 
the Dawson and Condarnine Rivers. In the sandstone, at Dulbydilla — which I have had 
an opportunity of examining minutely f — I saw no organic remains except plant- 
impressions, too imperfect for identification. At 398 miles (two miles east of Mun- 
gallalla Station), a fine-grained ferruginous sandstone, red to yellow in colour, yielded a 
number of curious impressions, to which Mr. John Falconer directed my attention, and 
* It is evident from the descriptions given by the late Eev. W. B. Clarice of the localities from which 
the Wollumbilla and Amby fossils were derived, that he had no idea that the sandstone tablelands in c^uestion 
Were distinct from the foasiliferous (Rolling Down) beds, an idea which the late Mr. Richard Baintree was 
the first to entertain. 
t In October, 188.0, when on an expedition in search of artesian water in the Western Interior, in 
company with the Hydraulic Engineer. 
