Cooper's Creek, the Diamentina, the Burke and the Hamilton, the Herbert
or Georgina, and Eyre Creek, all these end in the flats and shallows of
the Great Salt Lake District.

The remaining watercourses to the westward cannot be classed in any way,
their course is apparently determined by local inequalities of the
surface, and although some are very considerable in appearance, their
flow is so brief that it is impossible to consider them as at all forming
parts of one system; the longest and most important is Sturt's Creek.

The coast country, meaning the land watered by the rivers first
enumerated, has the advantage over the tableland in the matter of
rainfall, and the rivers therefore possess more of the characteristics of
running streams, than the chains of isolated ponds that are known as
rivers in the inland slope. The climatic influence is especially
noticeable in the indigenous grasses and herbage of the two regions. Mr.
George Ranken, in one of his essays on Australian subjects ["The
Squatting System of Australia," by "Capricornus."] draws an excellent
picture of the reclamation and transformation of the forest primeval.

"The first comers in 1788, found before them, as their ships came to
anchor, sandstone bluffs covered with scraggy trees and heath-like
plants, with a bright blue sky above, and an elastic, buoyant atmosphere
around. As they went inland, they found an endless open forest, the
ground being clothed with a light, tufty grass, but it was the starved
outline of European woodland scenery, for the trees rose bare and
branchless from a thirsty soil, and the grass covered only half, the
surface of the earth. Except the grass, and that was thin enough, though
it grew everywhere, the country seemed poor in products, and looked as if
it were involved in a constant struggle between droughts and floods. They