Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/62

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There is no Dividing Range in South Australia, and hence its climate has not the marked distinctions which arise in Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland from the existence of a high mountainous tract near the sea and a depressed low-lying interior. Two ranges of hills are met with running in a northerly direction: the first, the Mount Lofty Range, runs from the coast west of the Murray mouth, while the second commences at the head of Spencer Gulf, and as the Hinders Range continues in a picturesque chain to near Lake Blanch, south-east of Lake Eyre. But these ranges have no resemblance to the great forest-covered mountain ranges of the eastern coast of the continent.

Throughout its whole length in Queensland and New South Wales the Dividing Range closely agrees, in direction, with that of a series of tablelands, which in the former State rise to a height of 1500 feet above the sea-level at the sources of the Belyando River, with a width of about one hundred miles, while further south on the Darling Downs the width of the plateau is two hundred. In New South Wales there are three such plateaux, called the Northern Tableland, rising to a height of 5000 feet at Ben Lomond, the Central Tableland, including the Blue Mountains (Mount Beemering, 4100 feet), and the Southern Tableland, which ends at the Victorian border, rising in Mount Kosciusko to the altitude of 8308 feet. In Victoria the tablelands are much broken up by the cutting back of the rivers on either side of the Divide, so that in some places there is merely a single narrow steep ridge separating the waters that flow on one side direct to Bass Strait, and on the other into the Murray; while the isolated plateaux are situated on one or the other side of the Divide.

It must be remarked that there were tribes of natives who regularly inhabited these mountain tablelands, with the