Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/102

 rains; in summer, especially, the heat is mitigated by many heavy thunder showers. Notwithstanding its comparative vicinity to the tropics, Port Macquarie seems almost entirely exempt from those hot scorching winds, which so frequently occur during the summer months at Sydney; or if they ever happen in the Port Macquarie district, they are so slight as to be scarcely felt. Those sudden, violent gusts of wind, also, from the south, which generally happen at the close of a hot day in Sydney, raising dense clouds of dust in the air, and causing the thermometer to fall twenty degrees in a quarter of an hour, are comparatively unknown in the county of Macquarie. The north-eastern part of the territory of New South Wales, between the great main range, dividing the eastern and western waters, and the ocean, has never experienced such long desolating droughts as those which have occasionally been felt in the central and western parts of New South Wales. The greatest drought which has ever yet been experienced in the northern district was in 1841-2; the natural grasses at our stations were then quite desiccated on the ranges, and the whole country was continually in flames; the only young grass for the cattle and sheep being in the flats. Notwithstanding this, the chains of water-holes were as frill of water as ever, and I never saw finer crops of wheat than were reaped during this droughty season on the alluvial farms on the banks of the Wilson river, and at the squatting stations on the