Towards The End Of Their Course The Well-Defined Channels, With Banks
Sometimes Ten Feet High, Disappear, Giving Place To A Grassy Avenue
Through The Scrub, Lightly Timbered With Cork-Bark, And Other Small Trees.
It Is On Such Flats As These That The Wells Are Sunk.
All creeks find
their way into the lakes, though seldom by a discernible channel, breaking
and making, as the expression is, until a narrow arm of the lake stretches
to meet them.
At the most these creeks run "a banker" three times during
the year, the water flowing for perhaps three days; after which pools of
various sizes remain, to be in their turn dried up by evaporation and
soakage. In the dry weather the creeks afford a weird spectacle. Stately
white gums (the only timber of any size in these districts), with their
silvery bark hanging in dishevelled shreds around the branchless stems,
bend ghost-like over an undulating bed of gravel; gravel made up of
ironstone pebbles, quartz fragments, and other water-worn debris washed
down from the hills at the head of the creeks.
What a marvellous transformation the winter rains cause! It is then that
the expert, or journalist, takes his walks abroad; it is then that we read
such glowing accounts of rich grass lands, watered by countless creeks,
only awaiting the coming of an agriculturist to be turned into smiling
farms and fertile fields.
Numerous parties were camped at Lawlers, with some two hundred horses
turned out in the bush, waiting until rain should fall.
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