e same time, the waters
are carried off so rapidly that there are no supplies of moisture left
to serve for those seasons in which but little rain falls. The
districts along the banks of the Hunter, Hawkesbury, and Shoalhaven
Rivers have been especially liable to destructive inundations; and,
from time to time, the people of Sydney have been obliged to send up
lifeboats for the purpose of releasing the unfortunate settlers from the
roofs and chimneys of their houses, where they have been forced to seek
refuge from the rising waters. The Murrumbidgee also used occasionally
to spread out into a great sea, carrying off houses and crops, cattle,
and, oftentimes, the people themselves. In 1852 a flood of this
description completely destroyed the town of Gundagai, and no less than
eighty persons perished, either from drowning or from being exposed to
the storm as they clung to the branches of trees.

#5. The Dunbar.#--A great gloom was cast over the colony in 1857 by the
loss of a fine ship within seven miles of the centre of Sydney. The
_Dunbar_ sailed from Plymouth in that year with about a hundred and
twenty people on board, many of them well-known colonists who had
visited England, and were now on their way homewards. As the vessel
approached the coast, a heavy gale came down from the north-east, and,
ere they could reach the entrance to Port Jackson, night had closed
around them. In the deep and stormy gloom they beat to and fro for some
time, but at length the captain thought it safer to make for Sydney
Heads than to toss about on so wild a sea. He brought the vessel close
in to the shore in order to search for the entrance, and when against
the stormy sky he perceived a break in the black cliff's he steered for
the opening. This, however, was not the entrance, but only a hollow in
the cliffs, called by the Sydney people the "Gap". The vessel was
standing straight in for the rocks, when a mass of boiling surf was
observed in the place where they thought the opening was, and ere she
could be put about she crashed violently upon the foot of a cliff that
frowned ninety feet above; there was a shriek, and then the surf rolled
back the fragments and the drowning men. At daybreak the word was given
that a ship had been wrecked at the Gap, and during the day thousands of
people poured forth from Sydney to view the scene of the disaster. On
the following morning it was discovered that there was a solitary
survivor, who, havin