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The first two hours of the day were cloudy, but it cleared up and became very hot; the atmosphere was hazy and sultry; cumuli with undefined outlines all round the horizon: wind from south-west and south. I travelled west by north about eight miles, along the foot of Bastard-box and silver-leaved Ironbark ridges.
The nature of the soil was easily distinguished by its vegetation: the Bastard box, and Poplar gum grew on a stiff clay; the narrow-leaved Ironbark, the Bloodwood, and the Moreton Bay ash on a lighter sandy soil, which was frequently rotten and undermined with numerous holes of the funnel ant.
The Ironbark trees, which timbered the extensive flat along the river, became much finer; but the soil was rotten: the poplar-gum grew on the stiff soil of the hollows. About six miles from our last camp, we came to ranges of high hills of a conical form, and with rounded tops, striking from west to east, and then entered a narrow valley, bounded on each side by rocky hills. Mr.
The stringy-bark grew to a fine size on the hills, and would yield, together with Ironbark and the drooping tea-tree, the necessary timber for building. A new species of Melaleuca and also of Boronia were found, when entering upon the sandstone formation.
The bed of the Suttor was rather shallow, sandy, and irregular, with occasional patches of reeds; its left bank was covered with scrub; but well grassed flats, with Bastard-box and Ironbark, were on its right. We encamped near a fine reedy water-hole, nearly half a mile long, in lat. 21 degrees 21 minutes 36 seconds. We had travelled about fifteen miles west by north from our last camp.
The latter abound in the silver-leaved Ironbark forest, where the grass has been recently burned. After having contended with scrubs, with swamps, and with mountains, we were again doomed to grapple with our old enemy, the silver-leaved Bricklow, and a prickly Acacia with pinnate leaves, much resembling the A. farnesiana of Darling Downs.
The valley into which I entered was very different from these barriers; gentle slopes, covered with open forest of silver-leaved Ironbark, and most beautifully grassed, facilitated my gradual descent to the bottom of the valley, which was broad, flat, thinly timbered with flooded-gum and apple-trees, densely covered with grass, and, in the bed of the creek which passed through it, well provided with reedy water-holes.
That night, as I was sleeping on a stretcher at the back of the store, I was several times awakened by what seemed to be a stamping of feet. In the morning I found that the Chinaman had obtained an ironbark wooden shutter, and rigged up a figure four trap with bait underneath, and by this means had obtained a wheelbarrow full of dead rats.
I soon came to undulating ground or low hills of quartzose gravel without any grass, consisting of unabraded small angular fragments of quartz. I observed a few trees of the ironbark eucalyptus and pines or callitris on the highest grounds.
I moved my camp through the mountain gorge, the passage of which was rather difficult, in consequence of large boulders of sandstone, and of thickets of narrow-leaved tea-trees growing in the bed of the river. To the northward, it opens into fine gentle Ironbark slopes and ridges, which form the heads of the Isaacs.
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