Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/202

 fertility and moisture. Thus, in the country at the foot of the Australian Alps, which are seven thousand feet high, and the Port Macquarie district, in which the mountains are often upwards of six thousand feet in elevation, no injury or serious inconvenience has ever been sustained from long droughts. It has been lately averred that South Australia is superior, as an agricultural country, to any other of the Australian colonies. I am, however, afraid that South Australia will be found to be subject to severe droughts and scarcity of water, notwithstanding that it has now had several successive rainy seasons.

There are no mountains in that province, (for the ranges extending along the eastern shores of St. Vincent's and Spencer's gulfs, do not deserve that name), and there are no streams deserving the names of rivers; even the Murray river receives no tributaries of importance after entering the southern colony. The natural advantages of South Australia appear to me to be very inferior to those of New South Wales; for the former colony, as I have just observed, possesses no rivers of importance, with the exception of the lower Murray, and the land, beyond the mere banks of this large river, is an unavailable arid desert. There is, consequently, a great deficiency of rich alluvial land in South Australia; and although its plains of light chocolate-coloured loam, or black sandy earth, may yield, at present, good crops of wheat, they will soon require