Australia Twice Traversed - The Romance Of Exploration, Through Central South Australia, And Western Australia, From 1872 To 1876 By Ernest Giles
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This Was A Kind Of Glen, And I Found A Watercourse
In It, With A Great Quantity Of Tea-Tree,
Which completely choked up
the passage with good-sized trees, whose limbs and branches were so
interwoven that they prevented
Any animal larger than a man from
approaching the water, bubbling along at their feet. We had to chop a
passage to it for our horses. The hills were quite destitute of
timber, and were composed of huge masses of rifted granite, which
could only have been so riven by seismatic action, which at one time
must have been exceedingly frequent in this region.
I may mention that, from the western half of the Musgrave Range, all
the Mann, the Tomkinson, and other ranges westward have been shivered
into fragments by volcanic force. Most of the higher points of all the
former and latter consist of frowning masses of black-looking or
intensely red ironstone, or granite thickly coated with iron. Triodia
grows as far up the sides of the hills as it is possible to obtain any
soil; but even this infernal grass cannot exist on solid rock;
therefore all the summits of these hills are bare. These shivered
masses of stone have large interstices amongst them, which are the
homes, dens, or resorts of swarms of a peculiar marsupial known as the
rock wallaby, which come down on to the lower grounds at night to
feed. If they expose themselves in the day, they are the prey of
aborigines and eagles, if at night, they fall victims to wild dogs or
dingoes.
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