Page:Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, volume 2.djvu/142

 road being made, to the interior beyond them. My pass, therefore, through those lofty mountains (the mean elevation of which above the shores of Moreton Bay cannot be less than four thousand feet) seems thus the only opening to the interior country from the coast between the parallels of 26° and 29° south.

Whilst I was engaged at Moreton Bay, the long droughts to which our distant colony has been repeatedly subjected since its foundation, and which again visiting that country in 1826, had continued with most distressing severity for upwards of three years, led the colonial government to inquire into the state of the interior, to the westward of the termination of the Macquarie River, with the view of attempting to make some discoveries in that quarter. Whilst the drought continued, an expedition was despatched under the direction of Captain Sturt, an officer of his Majesty's 39th regiment, to Mount Harris, a detached hill upon the Macquarie River, where Mr. Oxley had left his boats upon proceeding easterly towards the coast. Upon reaching that remarkable eminence, which Captain Sturt and the party forming his expedition were enabled to do on the 20th of December, he ascended the summit to survey the country below. But how much had the evaporation of the sun, which, in its operation, had continued during a period of three years, changed the face of those regions! The plains which Mr. Oxley had left entirely under water in 1818, now presented an expanse of dried up surface, which to all appearance extended northerly, without the slightest semblance of rising ground, to a distant ' clear unbroken horizon.' Encouraged by these appearances, the expedition traced the Macquarie, through the last stage of its existence, to the woodlands below Mount Harris, where its channel, becoming broken and in parts having altogether disappeared on the common level, ceased 'to exist in any shape as a river,' In exploring the country beyond this point, the party traversed the bed of that extensive morass, into which the late surveyor-general had ten years previously descended in his boat: this they now found 'a large and blasted plain, on which the sun's rays fell with intense heat;' the ground itself, parched to an extreme, exhibiting in many places deep and dangerous clefts, which clearly demonstrated the long existence of those droughts, to which every known part of New South Wales was at that period exposed. On these inhospitable levels, Captain Sturt passed a week; and in that period he skirted three distinct patches of marsh, in which were found broken channels of the river, forming so many stagnant lagoons or canals, surrounded by reeds.

In whatever direction they advanced to satisfy themselves as to the fate of the Macquarie, whether on the plains or wooded grounds, reeds of gigantic stature (the clearest indication of what