To myself personally, the discovery of this river was a circumstance of a
particularly gratifying nature, since it not only confirmed the justness
of my opinion as to the ultimate fate of the Morumbidgee, and bore me out
in the apparently rash and hasty step I had taken at the depot, but
assured me of ultimate success in the duty I had to perform. We had got on
the high road, as it were, either to the south coast, or to some
important outlet; and the appearance of the river itself was such as to
justify our most sanguine expectations. I could not doubt its being the
great channel of the streams from the S.E. angle of the island. Mr. Hume
had mentioned to me that he crossed three very considerable streams, when
employed with Mr. Hovell in 1823 in penetrating towards Port Phillips, to
which the names of the Goulburn, the Hume, and the Ovens, had been given;
and as I was 300 miles from the track these gentlemen had pursued, I
considered it more than probable that those rivers must already have
formed a junction above me, more especially when I reflected that the
convexity of the mountains to the S.E. would necessarily direct the waters
falling inwards from them to a common centre.

We entered the new river at right angles, and, as I have remarked, at the
point of junction the channel of the Morumbidgee had narrowed so as to
bear all the appearance of an ordinary creek. In breadth it did not exceed
fifty feet, and if, instead of having passed down it, I had been making my
way up the principal streams, I should little have dreamt that so dark and
gloomy an outlet concealed a river that would lead me to the haunts of
civilized man, and whose fountains rose amidst snow-clad mountains. Such,
however, is the characteristic of the streams falling to the westward of
the coast ranges. Descending into a low and level interior, and depending
on their immediate springs for existence, they fall off, as they increase
their distance from the base of the mountains in which they rise, and in
their lower branches give little results of the promise they had