DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH OF
NEW SOUTH WALES
Atlas Page 22
By Francis Meyers,
F. J. Broomfield and J. P. Dowling
W
ESTERN DISTRICT
PART 2...
South-west from Orange
run some of the head-waters of the Lachlan River, which rise in the Canoblas, traversing
in their course the old mining districts of Canowindra and Cargo, and several fertile
agricultural areas. A good coach road runs to Forbes, which is situated eighty-four miles
distant on the Lachlan River, and along this route a railway line has been surveyed. The
land on either side is capable of supporting a large number of settlers, the climate is
good, and the soil, except in the broad patches of mineral country exceptionally rich.
Forbes was the scene of one of the successful Australian gold rushes Diggers from the
older fields of Young and Grenfell hastened thither; life for a time was wild and
impetuous; miners worked with the excitement of gamblers, and the human vultures that
crowd round successful diggers to ease them of their cash fared well. But when the
alluvial ground was worked out, the excitement all passed away; the wild life has gone,
and the steadier existence of farmers and squatters has succeeded. For a time there was
some doubt whether the soil, rich as it was, would grow wheat but all doubts on that point
have long been settled. With an average rainfall, wheat yields from twenty to thirty
bushels an acre, and oats from forty to sixty; potatoes and maize thrive well, and both
soil and climate seem specially suited to tobacco. Forbes, as the centre of this rich
district, is already a considerable town. It is built on moderately elevated land on the
northern bank of the river, which winds along the edge of a broad and fertile flat. This
is occasionally submerged; indeed, in times of high flood, the river spreads above and
below the town miles wide, filling billabongs and ana-branches innumerable, and storing
water for dry seasons. Any damage done by these floods is abundantly compensated by the
wealth they leave behind them. Rich flats are on either side, of the river, and the
country in the rear yields excellent pasture. Some of the largest sheep stations in the
colony lie between Forbes, Condobolin and Booligal farther down the river —Burrawang
station, about twenty-five miles distant, having a freehold of about two hundred and fifty
thousand acres, and shearing in favourable seasons about two hundred thousand sheep. A
railway line has been surveyed from Forbes to Wilcannia, on the River Darling, the central
township from which roads go north-west and south-west through a dry, but pastoral
district, to the gold and silver bearing country of the Barrier Ranges.
Twenty-two miles
north-west of Forbes is Parkes, a sister town with a very similar origin and history
—first a camping-place in the old pastoral days, then invaded by a rush of
gold-diggers, and then a township with a settled population, depending chiefly on mining
and agriculture. Cudal, nearer to the western line, is another prosperous and pleasantly
situated village; it is twenty-eight miles from Orange, and in the district of Molong. All
these western settlements focus naturally upon Orange, bringing into that healthy and
promising town the produce from their farms, stations and mines. Westward from Orange the
descent from the high land is rapid. Looking from the windows of the railway carriage in
the earlier stage of the journey, a lightly-wooded country is seen sloping away towards
the setting sun; the pasture still green even in the early days of midsummer, the
wildflowers star the grass, and occasionally, almost cover it with their colour and light.
A little lower down and a wash of the more sombre tints of the Australian summer is felt
rather than perceived over all the landscape. The cool fresh mountain air is passing away,
and the heat rises from the plains, now so rapidly approached. Gray-trunked box-trees
sparsely stud the landscape, together with ironbark and gum, and also the beautiful
kurrajongs, closely cropped for food during the years of drought, but bursting with the
first return of rain into fresh and luxuriant foliage. Thirty-five miles on and a thousand
feet down from Orange, is the mining village of Ironbarks, 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 soil is wonderfully prolific, though
too often even plenty of rain has its troubles for the farmer, who sees his hay, oats, or
wheat beaten down by a heavy storm just as he was counting on an abundant compensation for
all his losses during the years of drought. Much of the soil is decomposed trap overlying
the limestone and granite at the base of the hills, while the rich alluvial deposits
brought down by the Macquarie and the Bell 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 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 fertilising 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 into these limestone caves came, before the human interest of the
world began, 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 apteryx —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 down 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 and
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 farming than is generally seen in the colony.
At Maryvale, 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
quartz and granite country, with the usual clothing of stunted forest and scant herbage,
the good soil runs right down the river to Dubbo, thirty miles to the north-west.
Dubbo is ordinarily associated with pastoral work on a large scale, with fierce heats,
long droughts, and that old Australian life which knew of little beyond mutton, wool and
beef, and the labour by which they are produced. In its earliest days it was the natural
business centre for the sheep and cattle stations of the lower Bogan and the Macquarie. A
slab-walled, bark-roofed shanty, was the primitive style of building, giving way in the
ordinary course of development to the one-storied public-house, with separate ends for
squatters and bushmen. It is almost fifty years since the first store was opened at Dubbo,
and forty since the earliest holders of Crown grants tried any experiment in agriculture.
The drought-proof saltbush was high and dense on all the plains, and the millions of
kurrajongs, myalls and mulgas had never been cropped on their lower boughs by the cattle
in seasons of distress. Nature’s reserves were sufficient to stand the severest
trials, and the only anxiety of teamsters and bullock-drivers even in the driest seasons
was to make from water to water. Still a little farming was successfully carried on, the
grain was carted thirty tedious miles to the Wellington mill, and back again as flour. But
after the Land Act of 1861 many selectors settled on the fertile soil. In 1872 the town
had become so considerable that it was proclaimed a municipality and stores, hotel, and
banks followed in the wake of the settlers. For a few subsequent years there were abundant
rains; the country was full of prosperity and promise; sheep and cattle multiplied on the
land. Not only frontages and fertile flats, but back blocks, naturally waterless, were
taken up and fully stocked. The fat years passed, a long lean time succeeded —a
monotonous drought, broken only by one interval, and lasting for ten years. And yet in
spite of heavy losses the occupation of the country has survived the test.
The town of Dubbo is a busy one with enlarging industries, and about it are all the
indications of stout-hearted occupation and steady advance. Nor is this surprising, for it
is not a village set in a pastoral wilderness, but the farthest western outpost of
prosperous agriculture. All down the Macquarie anything from maize to wheat, and from
cotton to potatoes, may be grown abundantly. For many miles along its farther course the
river consists of a series of basin-like depressions, shut in and divided by bars of rock;
at varying distances below its present bed extends a stratum of loose drift or gravel,
which, touched by a shaft or boring tube, yields a pure and never-failing supply of water.
The township of Dubbo lies within one of these basins, and numerous windmills in evergreen
gardens irrigate the thirsty soil. The Dubbo basin was probably at one time a lake or
marsh similar to those still existing lower down the river, and which was gradually filled
up by the detritus brought down by the higher levels, a narrow channel only being kept
open. The surface river is but the visible drainage channel; the permanent waters lie
below, saved from pollution and heat by the easily-pierced coating of overlying earth.
This underground supply of water has an important bearing on the future of the district,
as in addition to meeting all domestic demands, it will furnish enough for a limited
irrigation. Every settler can have his well and his windmill, with not only a full supply
for domestic luxury, but for the requirements of garden, orchard, and paddock. The area
capable of irrigation is large, and the agriculture the future will have wide scope in
providing provender for the pastoral stations on either side. Nor does the future
prosperity of the town depend on agriculture and pastoral work alone. Coal crops up in the
neighbourhood, and on the Baltimore Mountain one seam nearly six feet in thickness has
been opened out. The country to the north-west is known to be rich in copper ore, and it
is reasonable to look forward to the establishment of a large smelting industry. At
present, however, Dubbo is little more than a pleasant village with comfortable cottage
homes and the usual commercial and public buildings. The district is healthful and the
children thrive, though not with such promise m their limbs, or roses in their faces, as
are seen on the table-lands.
As the traveller follows the line of
the railway more to the north-west, he notes that the aspect of the county gradually
changes. The trees fall back, the plains expand, shea-oak belts enclose great flats, where
in good season tall wild oats hide the sheep; the saltbush becomes frequent, and soon
large clumps of lemon-tinted narran are seen, with sandalwood and emu-bush, and then a
flat all myalls and saltbush. On this broad plain the beautiful myall is not only
characteristic, but supreme. It spreads from the railway fence to the dark belt on the
horizon, willow-like in its pendant boughs, with dark trunk and olive-silvery foliage, and
if but a bough be broken, exuding an odour as sweet as that of violets or new-mown hay. Of
all the native growths the myall is the fittest to droop over a grave, to be the in
memoriam tree of Australia, sacred as the yew in England and the cypress in Italy.
The railway line follows the ridge of the watershed between the Bogan and the Macquarie
Rivers. The first township of any importance is Nyngan, where the railroad crosses the
Bogan, and from which branches off a railway to the west to the mining township of Cobar.
From Nyngan the railway rims over a poor, patchy, pastoral country, passing Girilambone,
where there are large outcrops of copper ore, which, however, have not yet led to the
discovery of profitable mines; past Coolabah —the native name for a full-foliaged
handsome description of eucalyptus —and on to Bourke, which is at present the
north-western railway terminus. To get a comprehensive understanding of this north-western
district, it will be well to follow the line from Nyngan to Cobar. For the whole seventy
miles there is hardly a sign of all agricultural or a pastoral homestead. The soil is a
light red sand, and patches of scrub are frequent. There is little to be seen but wire
fences and sheep clustered about the dams, or camped in the shade of the trees.
Cobar, a mining township seventy miles from Nyngan, looks an anomaly among the great
pasturages —a municipality with mayor and aldermen, courthouse, banks, churches, and
schools, out in the midst of the sheep and cattle, the kangaroos and emus, and the wild
scrub country. The germ from which the isolated township grew was an outcrop of copper ore
—a singular deposit, contained chiefly in a conical hill, on a poorly grassed,
lightly-timbered plain. In the hillside is a spring, and stockmen and shepherds were often
puzzled by the bright green deposit about the rocks, and the metallic taste of the water.
Some practical investigators, attracted by the bushmen’s yarns set themselves to
trace out the cause of this green deposit, and very soon came on magnificent lodes of
various descriptions of copper ore. A company was formed to work the property, and a
township grew with great rapidity. Cornish and Welsh miners were brought up the Darling
from Adelaide, furnaces were built, shafts sunk, adits driven, and copper to the value of
upwards of a million sterling has already been raised. The primitive buildings were mostly
of slabs, pine-logs, or pisé work, but many of them have already been replaced by
substantial brick structures. A fall in the price of the metal and the difficulty of
obtaining fuel for roasting ores and smelting have given a check to the progress of the
place. Firewood has to be brought by a tram-line fifteen miles in length, the bush for
some distance round having been cleared of timber. The hope of this copper district
—for the indications of copper ore are widely spread —lies in railway
communication with the coalfields in the neighbourhood of Dubbo.
Beyond Cobar to the west, and running
through much scrub land, is the road to Wilcannia, the river port of the central Darling,
of the Paroo, of the Barcoo, and the Diamantina country of Queensland, of the gold and
silver country in the burnt, bleak Barrier Ranges, and of a great area of rich pastoral
land bordering on and adjacent to the river. Wilcannia has grown up since 1868, being the
best crossing place for stock travelling from the north-western pastures to the Melbourne
and Sydney markets. From being a mere fording township it grew to more importance as the
starting-point to the goldfields of Mount Brown and the silver country to the south-west.
Excellent stone has been found in quarries in the neighbouring hill, and good and
substantial buildings indicate that the old ford is to be a permanent township. A varied
and peculiar traffic is found in Wilcannia. Horse and bullock teams trend through the
streets, and camp on the common every day. The river steamers, constructed for
shallow-water navigation, pass up the stream laden with stores and down with bales of
wool. But novel to Australian bushmen are the camel teams which were introduced in order
to make the journey to the mining districts when two or three days’ stages had to be
travelled without water. From four to eight pairs of these quaint creatures are harnessed
to an ordinary horse-waggon and encouraged by their Arab or Afghan driver, toil with many
a grunt and groan over their weary and arduous journey. Two hundred miles lie between
Wilcannia and the townships of the gold and silver fields —a dreary distance
unrelieved by any pleasant break.
But travelling up and down this river when the water is in flood is by no means
dreadful. The boats used in the trade are fairly comfortable, with sleeping cabins placed
on a hurricane-deck. Towing one or two barges astern, they fight their way manfully
upstream, cutting out in times of high flood to ana-branches or side currents, steaming
away over tree-tops, and not unfrequently getting hung up or snagged on submerged
obstacles. They travel by day and by night, some old river pilots preferring the darkest
night as the three or four powerful lights invariably carried show ahead a broad
illuminated path, along which it is tolerably easy to steer. But the up-river journey is
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, grey 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, stockman, 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 railways 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. The
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 galvanised 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. And
indeed there are not many wet days in Bourke. Winter months bring occasionally piercing
winds, the thermometer standing at 50°. Summer is unmistakably hot, the mercury, even in
the shade, often ranging from 110° to 125°. It is not the place in which a mail 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 town focuses, or passes by, much that is interesting and peculiar may be seen.
The larger hotels, after the old colonial style, are divided into two parts —this the
squatter’s side, that the bushman’s. There are of course characters of all
sorts, and some are steady and sober, but too many of the bushmen, stockmen, shearers,
boundary riders, drovers, steamboat men, all drink together, get drunk, lie upon the
benches, get sober, go down to the river for a swim, "get broke" —or, in
more intelligible phrase, spend all their earnings —and clear out for work again.
The squatters —old fellows, inured to bush
life and lost to all desire of the city, and young fellows only a year from the coast, but
all of the fine coppery hue which a year of the Darling still puts on —lounge about
the other side. The business of the day seems to be to lounge, to drink at intervals, to
yarn continuously, to speculate on the prospects of the season, and, without ceasing,
though in their own fashion, to pray for rain. The townsfolk go about their business
leisurely enough. Bankers, public officials, and others keep for awhile a metropolitan
style, but not beyond a single summer; the languor of the hot north changes their manners
before they change the cut of their clothes. The two great businesses in Bourke are the
carrying of goods and the purveying of drinks. Every second shop seems to dispense
liquors, and happily, since the completion of the railway, many varieties of drinks are
brewed from the lemons and oranges and ice brought up by the daily train from the coast.
Bullock teams, horse teams and American coaches come into the town from all points of the
compass and in the busy season the streets are lively with shearers with packhorses, and
swagsmen with all their estates on their backs, steamboat hands, and drovers from the
Warrego, the Paroo, and the Bulloo.
The shearers may have left their mountain homes at Monaro in midwinter, may travel a
couple of thousand miles, do good work, and then reach home again by harvest. The swagman
may have walked the length and breadth of these colonies; but the river men live, and hope
to die, on the water. The drovers are the busiest and perhaps the most interesting of all
fellows who live at least sixteen hours out of the twenty-four in the saddle, who bring
down the big mobs of cattle from the rich pasturage of western Queensland, truck them at
the yards a couple of miles out of the town, enjoy in their own way their loose day or
two, and then make back again. Strange experience this for the cattle —creatures as
wild as buffaloes, who on their native pastures would bolt from a man who should venture
near them unmounted; yet not less than fifty thousand are trucked every year, long trains
with the living freight starting citywards every day. In the near future this live stock
traffic may end, and a great slaughtering and freezing establishment may be at work on the
edge of the great pastures. If this anticipated change takes place, Bourke may develop
somewhat on the lines of Chicago.
Nor is it necessary that the produce of the district should be confined to wool and
meat only. A glance at the Chinese garden irrigated by an engine and a Tangye pump,
lifting water from two wells, shows that the soil will grow anything —peaches,
grapes, oranges, oats, cotton, tobacco, maize, and all sorts of vegetables. Three miles
east of Bourke the river is bridged, and from that bridge the roads branch off to the
border, and over ten degrees of longitude to the great downs of Queensland and the
Northern Territory of South Australia.
To the north lies the country of the
springs, a remarkable tract running between the Warrego and the Paroo, where the water
breaks right through to the surface —sometimes through a stratum of pipe clay,
bearing up so much of that easily-soluble substance as to be undrinkable and valueless, at
others from a stratum of unsalted drift, through limestone or ferruginous rock,
overflowing pure limpid cool; giving birth to a verdant grass and reed growth, and making
a rare oasis on the plain. Beyond the springs lies a poor scrubby country, with a sparse
supply of spinifex, and before the rich downs of Queensland are reached is Barrigun, where
ultimately great Queensland overland line will join that of New South Wales.
Brewarrina is seventy miles east of Bourke on the left bank of the river. It is
somewhat similar to the latter both in architecture and design and anticipates a like
future. To the north, towards the Queensland border, it commands a country infinitely
superior to the background of Bourke —at least twenty thousand square miles of rich
black flats, broken up by occasional sand ridges traversed by the four creeks, which
receive the waters of the Queensland Balonne, and discharge into the Cato (a branch of the
Darling) and the Narran Lake. There are great possibilities in this country, but as yet
enterprise has been only primitively pastoral. The waters run to waste in floods, the
plains bake and burn in times of drought; a few tanks indeed have been excavated, a few
dams made on the creeks, but nothing adequately to meet the terrible exigencies of a
climate whose fat and lean years come almost as regularly as those foretold by Joseph in
Egypt.
The aspect of this great country is not wanting in the picturesque; the mirage is
frequently seen in perfection —trees inverted in phantom lakes, sheep in the distance
looming like advancing armies, swagsmen taking on gigantic proportions, and seeming at
times to rise suddenly from the earth. Here also is seen that peculiar phenomenon of the
lifting or expanding horizon at sunrise and even. In the heat of day, all around seems
bare, bald, plain; the range of vision being limited by the refraction of heated air, but
just at dawn or evening the traveller familiar only with the daylight aspect, is
astonished to see long lines of black timber by various lagoons and creeks, the serrated
crest of a pine ridge with the dark and tangled woods below, horses and bullocks an
hour’s ride away and emus and kangaroos making down to the water. All are swallowed
up, and with almost equal rapidity, in increasing light and darkness. Many varieties of
timber trees also are found here quite foreign to dwellers on the high lands of the coast.
The ghostly brigalow grows in thorny clumps on the poorest ground, the gidya bears a broad
and shady crown with bunches of pale yellow blossoms malodorous in the extreme; the
leopard-tree lifts its quaint spotted trunk, and here is found the beef-wood, which shows
on its cleavage a grain strongly resembling that of a broad-cut steak. Mulga, myall, and
yarran are abundant and, as undergrowth, there are all varieties of salt and cotton bush,
and an infinite variety of succulent herbs.
Farther up the river is Walgett, the permanent head of the Darling navigation; and from
Walgett there is a good coach road to Coonamble and thence to Dubbo. Walgett is an
important town, and most favourably situated with respect to general convenience of trade.
It is accessible from the northern as well as from the western lines, and does also a very
considerable business with the country beyond the river both its rivers are bridged, and
an effort has been made to make both navigable but the snags in the Namoi proved too
formidable even when covered by the highest flood.
Coonamble, a hundred miles down the Castlereagh River almost due south of Walgett,
touches again on the agricultural country. The future of the town depends on the
development of the agricultural resources, which are scarcely inferior to those of Dubbo.
Indeed the soil here, east, west, north and south, is adapted to tillage; but the
alternating years of terrible floods and disastrous droughts is disheartening to any but
well sustained and strongly supported effort.
A hundred and ten miles of coaching through as fair a pastoral country as any squatting
prospector could desire, brings the traveller from Coonamble back to Dubbo.
Creeks and rivers are frequent
throughout the journey —all that network of streams from the Namoi to the Bogan,
which water some of the finest stations the colony knows —a glorious country in a
rainy spring, a terrible scene of desolation in a dry summer. Agriculture attacks its
southern skirts, and supports such little, townships as Warren and Cannonbar; but all its
northern breadth is given over to sheep, and probably will be held exclusively for sheep
through many future years. But it may be so developed and improved by water conservation
and irrigation by the reservation and storage of the extra growth of good years, as to be
habitable and tolerable, and ultimately profitable through any succession of seasons or of
cycles.
Generally speaking the western and north-western portion of New South Wales constitutes
a district distinctly marked out by Nature as having its own special character. Hitherto
it has been purely pastoral, except so far as it has been interfered with by mining
adventurers. In a state of nature the country is not very occupiable any distance back
from the Darling. When first taken up by speculative pastoralists the land was only
available for grazing purposes for half the year, and not even that unless there had been
an average rainfall. But by dint of much labour in increasing the water supply, many large
districts have been made pasturable all the year round. For increasing this water supply
two methods have been adopted. The first has been to gather the surface water, and this
has been done by selecting natural hollows, deepening them and running plough furrows
towards them. In this way, the surplus rainfall is collected into large earthen tanks. The
soil excavated makes a high bank around, and this breaks the play of the wind over the
water and diminishes the evaporation. Many tanks of this kind, however, have been prepared
for over three years before rain enough fell to fill them.
The other method of storing water is by sinking wells. The subterranean supply has
these two advantages; it is cooler, and it is not exposed to evaporation. Generally,
however, it has to be pumped to the surface, and the wells are costly to make and to
maintain. Scores have been sunk without tapping water at all, and in many other cases the
water has been too salt for use. The enterprise of the squatter is often rewarded by a
well which never falls even in the driest season. In fact, the well is quite independent
of the local rainfall, for the water pumped up in the Darling basin has fallen first upon
the western plains of Queensland, and having soaked in there is pursuing its underground
course to the sea.
The natural fodder of the great west consists of grass and the various salsolaceous
plants. The former, however, exists only a short time after rain, the intense heat soon
turning the green herbage into something resembling live hay, after which it dries up into
chips and powder and is blown away by the wind, leaving the ground as bare as a road. Yet
with all these drawbacks the country has been not unprofitably occupied, for it is
remarkably healthy, both for sheep and cattle; the squatters, who in the main have been a
highly enterprising class, have already done much to protect themselves against the
irregularities of the climate, and every year they are learning more and more the art of
turning the great western country to account. Forbidding as the land looks to a stranger
in the bad season, this vast district is a very valuable province of New South Wales.
.cont...
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