In Northern Australia Spinifex Is
In Seed For Three Weeks, And When In This State, Forms Most Excellent
Feed For Horses, And Fattens Almost As Quickly As Oats; For The Rest Of
The Year It Is Useless.
I can imagine any one, on being suddenly placed on rising ground with a
vast plain of waving spinifex spreading before him - a plain relieved
occasionally by the stately desert oak, solemn, white, and
mysterious - saying, "Ah!
What a charming view - how beautiful that rolling
plain of grass! its level surface broken by that bold sandhill, fiery-red
in the blaze of sun!" But when day after day, week after week, and month
after month must be passed always surrounded by the hateful plant, one's
sense of the picturesque becomes sadly blunted.
This was our first introduction to the desert and, though a little
monotonous, it seemed quite pleasant, and indeed was so, when compared
to the heartrending country met with later in our journey.
The sand has been formed (blown, I suppose) into irregular ridges,
running more or less parallel, but in no one fixed direction. From the
edge of the desert to Mount Worsnop, a distance of nearly two hundred
miles in a straight line, the country presented the same appearance.
First a belt, eight to ten miles wide, of sand-ridges from thirty to
fifty feet high, with a general direction of E. by S. and W. by N.; then
a broad sand-flat of equal breadth, either timbered with desert gums, or
open and covered with spinifex breast-high, looking in the distance like
a field of ripe corn; next another series of ridges with a S.E. and N.W.
direction; then, with startling suddenness, a small oasis, enclosed or
nearly surrounded by sheer broken cliffs of desert sandstone, from which
little creeks run out into the sand, winding their way for a mile or two
between the ridges. Dry watercourses these, except immediately after
rain; in their beds are found native wells five to ten feet in depth,
sometimes holding water; on their banks, round the foot of the cliffs,
and on the flat where the creeks merge into the sand, grows long
grass - kangaroo-grass - and, in the winter magnificent herbage. Next we
find a dense thicket, and, this passed, we come again to open plains. And
thus sand-ridges now E. and W., now S.E. and N.W., now S.W. and N.E. (as
in the vicinity of Empress Spring), and now sandhills heaped up without
regularity, alternate with mulga thickets, open plains of spinifex, and
flat, timbered country. The most noticeable vegetation is of course
spinifex; as well as that, however, are several shrubs which form good
camel feed, such as ACACIA SALICINA, with its pretty, scented flower like
a little golden powder-puff; the quondong (FUSANUS ACUMINATUS), or
"native peach tree," a graceful little black-stemmed tree, against whose
fresh, green leaves the fruit, about the size of a cherry and of a
brilliant red, shows out with appetising clearness.
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