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Updated: June 2, 2025
Four miles beyond this hill we halted at some rain water. We have seen three or four kangaroos to-day; they were the red sort with white breasts. Distance travelled, eight miles. Wednesday 21st July, Grass and Salt-Bush Plains. Left the camp at 9 a.m. on a bearing of 97 degrees. Camped at some rain water in a clay-pan.
At seven miles crossed the Neale, spread over a large grassy plain four miles broad, and ascended a low ridge of table-topped hills, stony, with salt-bush and grassed. Crossed another creek, at twenty miles, with myall and stunted gums running over a plain in numerous courses. Plenty of grass but no water.
This range is very stony, composed of a hard milky-white flint stone, and white and yellow chalky substance, with a gradual descent on the other side to the south, which is the finest salt-bush country that I have seen, with a great quantity of grass upon it. The grey mare has been very bad; her belly was very much swollen, but this morning she seemed better.
The first three miles of to-day's journey were over good country; it then became rather scrubby, with numerous small creeks and valleys running to the east. Plenty of grass and salt-bush, with gravel, ironstone, and lime on the surface. At a mile before we made the rugged creek the ironstone became less, and a hard white stone took its place, and continued to the range, on which it is also found.
Many have known the breath of the pampas beyond the Amazon; the soft pungency of the wattle blown across the salt-bush plains of Australia; the friendly exhilaration of the prairie or the chaparral; the living, loving loneliness of the desert; but yonder on the veld is a life of the night which possesses all the others have, and something of its own besides; something which gets into the bones and makes for forgetfulness of the world.
And away beyond the horizon, southward still, the geodesic curve carries that monotony across the zone of salt-bush, myall, and swamp box; across the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee, and on to the Victorian border say, two hundred and fifty miles.
In a few miles another fine creek-channel came out of the range to the north of us, near the foot of Mount James-Winter; it soon joined a larger one, up which was plenty of running water; this I called the Reid*. We were now traversing another very pretty valley running nearly west, with fine cotton and salt-bush flats, while picturesque cypress pines covered the hills on both sides of us.
Work soon commenced in earnest, and progress made, in building a small house, sheep yards, and the necessary improvements for a sheep station. The country consisted of plains, with patches of scrub between, in which there was abundance of salt-bush, all carrying good feed for the sheep. Mr.
Further on there were indications of salt, and as we were quite out of that commodity, we rode over to try and procure some, but none existed, and we had to be satisfied with a quantity of samphire bushes and salt-bush leaves, which we took home with us, returning to Fort McKellar the following day. I called the salt feature Lake Christopher.
The back-country man, though saturnine, is very rarely quarrelsome, and almost never a pugilist; nevertheless, his foot on his native salt-bush, it is not advisable to assault him with any feebler weapon than rifle-and-bayonet. There is a radical difference, without a verbal distinction, between his and the Englishman's notions of fair-play.
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