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 (discovered by Allan Cunningham, the king's botanist, in 1830, when he travelled from Sydney to Moreton Bay by land), which are watered by the river of the same name. These downs are part of a system of high table lands continued toward the north, where the boundaries are indefinite, by the Fitzroy Downs, discovered by Sir Thomas Mitchell in 1846, and toward the south by the New England district. There a rapid descent changes the climate from snow and hail to the hot country of the Peel, Page, and the Liverpool Plains, bounded on the south by the great dividing or Liverpool Kange, through which Pandora's Pass gives exit to the Hunter River; and thus with intervals of mountain range or desert, a series of pastoral plains run parallel with the interior of the mountain range which encircles the eastern coast of Australia, including the Groulburn, Bathurst district, the Maneroo or Brisbane Downs, and the Murray district, which flow into, if we may use the term, the province of Victoria. And in this series of pastoral plains the climate is considerably modified by their altitude above the sea. It was these plains, where fine-woolled sheep increase and multiply at the least possible expense, which first gave exports and wealth to Australia. Before the shepherd and his flock the savage and the emu gradually disappear.

CHAPTER XXIV.

N traversing the coast from Port Jackson to Port Phillip there is a singular absence of good harbours. The first. Botany Bay, fourteen miles from Port Jackson, receives the waters of the George River, on which the township of Liverpool was planted by Macquarie, but has not flourished; and the Cook's River which has been dammed, for the purpose of affording a supply of fresh water to Sydney. Botany Bay is unsheltered, and offers indifferent accommodation for small vessels. A brass plate on the cliffs marks the spot where Captain Cook first landed; and the stranger may drink from the well of fresh water opened by that illustrious navigator.

Between Botany Bay and Shoalhaven is Illawarra, also known as the Five Islands, one of the most fertile and wildly beautiful districts in the world, which, from the peculiarity of its situation, bounded by the sea for eighteen miles, running north and south, and by a mountain chain which encircles about 150,000 acres, unites the peculiarities of