Page:Journals of Several Expeditions Made in Western Australia.djvu/233

 Albany, King George's Sound, Western Australia, July 31st, 1832.

In the expectation that this may reach your Excellency in England, and thinking that any additional information respecting the colony may be of importance, I beg you will allow me the honour to state, that in the end of May and beginning of June, I made an excursion into the interior, sixty-five miles and a half in a direction of N. 328° E. (true) in four days and a half I passed on the south and west side of Mount Barker, and soon came into a very level country, with few trees, growing in a gravelly loam, thinly covered with grass. This is the general feature of the country as far as I proceeded, presenting the greatest facilities to overland communication with Swan River. I ascended Warre-up or Road Hill, which is N. 328° E. (true) from Mount Clarence, distant forty-eight miles and a half; a few miles north of it is a channel, with, at my visit, large ponds of good water; a Java bullock, in high condition, fed upon its banks. Beyond this the ground gradually rises into moderate and very traversable hills and valleys, the soil improves, the grass, even at such a season, became abundant, and water stood in pools in the channels of the valleys. I returned by the west end of the Koikyennuruff Range, and ascended Madyerip, the western hill, which I suppose to be 1400 feet above the level of the sea; it is wholly composed, like part of Toolbrunup, of a quartzy sandstone: a plain, with numerous salt lakes, lies to the north of it, and neither from it nor from Warre-up did