Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/95

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MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS.
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as the waters flow; men congregate in cities to avail themselves of surrounding advantages; population and wealth go hand in hand, and the country is called great.

Vast as is Australia, no high lands are in or near its centre. One chain of hills or mountains runs from the base of the Cape York Peninsula along the eastern coast, its highest points culminating in the Snowy Mountains or Australian Alps in the south-east, where the summit of Mount Kosciusko exceeds 7300 feet above the sea. Of this cordillera the watershed is sometimes less, seldom is it more, than one hundred miles from the east coast. A spur from it runs westward from the Snowy Mountains through the Colony of Victoria, dividing the northern waters, which are affluents of the Murray, from the shorter streams which run into Bass's Straits and the Southern Ocean.[1]

Curving from their sources in the Snowy Mountains, the Murray, the Tumut, and Murrumbidgee rivers find their way to the plains of the interior before they join the Darling River, which drains an enormous area, receiving tributaries from the western slopes of the cordillera in New South Wales and Queensland.

In both these colonies various rivers find their way eastward to the Pacific from the cordillera; and from Queensland other rivers flow to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Roughly speaking, it may be said that westward of the 140th degree of E. longitude the well-watered portion of Australia disappears; the eastern cordillera being the genius of the difference.

Western Australia is poor in rivers, and the Great Australian Bight on the south coast presents the most irredeemably barren front to the Southern Ocean.

To the west of Adelaide the combined Murray and Darling Rivers carry their tribute to the sea at Encounter Bay; but evaporation and percolation have diminished its waters long before Lake Alexandrina receives it.

The Yarra Yarra at Melbourne in a comparatively short course flows from spurs of the Australian Alps, and several ever-flowing rivers run from them with rapid courses to the

  1. ↑ In the first edition of this work some space was devoted to a physical description of Australia; Dr. A. R. Wallace's "Australasia" has made it superfluous to enter into details on the subject in this edition.
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