Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/73

 large and problematical area behind them, whose condition is at all times so important to their respective climates. Thus they occasionally enjoy an unusually cool season, as they occasionally also at other times suffer one that is unusually hot.

It does so happen that our accounts of the Australian interior as received from its various explorers are chequered by these very extremes. Several of the principal expeditions happened to have been undertaken in seasons presenting one or other of these extremes. The summer of 1844-5, during which Sturt was repulsed from the Desert, was one of great and unusual drought, as we ourselves well recollect with reference to the colony of Victoria, where scarcely a drop of rain fell during the four months from December to April. On the other hand, the season of 1861-2 was unusually moist and cool. In Victoria this season was considered to be the wettest the colonists had experienced in the country. This was the season in which Landsborough careered through the interior—that dry and thirsty land of Gregory and Sturt—almost as though it had been one universal grass park; and in which McKinlay found his difficulties to arise, not, as with Sturt and Gregory, from drought and arid waste, but from water.

The water supply is, indeed, the key to the whole question. This sub-tropical area, with all its