Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/63

II exception of the highest parts of the south of New South Wales and Victoria, which tracts, however, they visited yearly as soon as the inhospitable snows of winter had melted.

The fall inland from the tablelands is much more gradual than that towards the sea, the hilly country becomes lower, the plain country wider, and at last the great levels of the interior are reached. The tribes who occupied the intermediate position between those living in the hot dry districts of Central Australia, and those who inhabited the tablelands and coast regions, lived under much more favourable conditions than the former. They had a better rainfall, and from the waters of the Thomson, Barcoo, Darling, Murray, and numerous other more or less permanent streams and surrounding country obtained supplies of fish and game. The tribes in Northern Victoria were in the same position. The south-western country in Queensland consists chiefly of plains crossed occasionally by low sandstone ridges and merging into vast tracts subject to inundation, as well as sandhill country which in normal seasons is arid, and in times of drought little better than a desert.

Central Australia may be described as the lower part of a shallow basin into which the drainage, when there is any, flows to Lake Eyre. Here and there out of the vast stretches of open country there arise at distant intervals isolated masses of rock, such as Mount Olga, or the remains of the desert sandstone show as lines of flat-topped hills. The lower country is either successive sand ridges, extending for long distances, sometimes as at Lake Hope, a hundred changeless miles, or there are what are called Gibber plains, which are well described by Spencer and Gillen as follows:—"On these Gibber plains the ground is covered with brown and purple stones, often set close