Page:Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, volume 2.djvu/140

 us, having actually descended a wooded ridge, from which there was an abrupt declivity of one thousand five hundred and forty feet. After a severe march of thirty miles through a barren forest, for the most part of blighted Iron-bark, furnishing but little pasturage and still less water, we at length arrived at Barrow's Valley of Mr. Oxley, which, in seasons of long rains, is evidently laid under water by the overflow of Field's River, which, in its course inland, we met meandering north-west, through the adjacent forest. On the bank of this river, where I gave my horses a day's rest upon the richest meadow-land we had seen in the whole tour, it was with pleasure that 1 hailed the colonial blue gum (Eucalyptus piperita) of stupendous size, the alluvial grounds on each bank producing also the herbage of the flooded flats of the Hawkesbury River in the colony. On the 20th of July, we resumed our route to the southward, and after pursuing a steady course for about twenty-seven miles through a barren, brushy country, not nine hundred feet above the level of the sea, we passed the northern margin of Liverpool Plains, throughout which, such had been the effect of drought, that we crossed their extensive surface almost to the foot of the dividing range (a space of twenty-five miles) before we found water for the horses or ourselves. On the 28th my party repassed the Mountain Range, and after an absence of thirteen weeks, we returned to the station from which we had departed, on the Hunter, having, in that period, traversed upwards of eight hundred miles of every description of country.

My report to the Colonial Government of this journey—of the spacious downs we had discovered in latitude 28°—and the considerable tract of very indifferent country, in part actual desert, that lay between the colony and those extensive pastoral lands, immediately suggested the importance of examining the space between those downs and the sea-coast at Moreton Bay; since, should the Gap, which had been discovered in the main dividing range in the above parallel, prove, on actual survey, to admit of a passage through that chain of mountains, the readiest point of access to the very desirable country on their western side would be from the shores of Moreton Bay and Brisbane River,—on the banks of the latter of which a penal settlement had already been established for several years. This inquiry became one of the objects of my voyage from Port Jackson the following year; and its results proved every way most satisfactory to the colonial government, and the colonists generally.

As I propose to make some general remarks elsewhere on the character of the country around Moreton Bay—a country alike interesting to the botanist and geologist—I will here simply remark, that in exploring the intermediate tract between the Brisbane River and the point where my overland journey of the pre-