ere was another sheep station a mile and a
half from it, along the road I had examined. Thus the country suitable
for either kind of stock is taken up by the gradual encroachment of sheep
on cattle runs, not properly such. This easily takes place--as where
sheep feed, cattle will not remain, and sheep will fatten where cattle
would lose flesh. Fortunately, however, for the holders of the latter
description of stock, there are limits to this kind of encroachment. The
plains to the westward of these ranges afford the most nutritive
pasturage in the world for cattle, and they are too flat and subject to
inundations to be desirable for sheep. A zone of country of this
description lies on the interior side of the ranges, as far as I have
examined them. It is watered by the sources of the rivers Goulburn,
Ovens, Murray, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan, Bogan, Macquarie, Castlereagh,
Nammoy, Peel, Gwydir, and Darling; on which rivers the runs will always
make cattle fat. There are two shrubs palpably salt, and, perhaps, there
is something salsolaceous in the herbage also on which cattle thrive so
well; and the open plains and muddy waterholes are their delight.
Excessive drought, however, may occasionally reduce the owners of such
stock to great extremities, and subject them to serious loss. The Acacia
pendula, a tree whose HABITAT is limited and remarkable, is much relished
by the cattle. It is found only in clay soils, on the borders of plains,
which are occasionally so saturated with water as to be quite impassable;
never on higher ground nor on any lower than that limited sort of
locality, in the neighbourhood of rivers which at some seasons overflow.
In such situations, even where grass seems very scarce, cattle get fat;
and it is a practice of stockmen to cut down the Acacia pendula (or Myall
trees, as they call them) for the cattle to feed on.

At this sheep station where we had encamped, I met with an individual who
had seen better days, and had lost his property amid the wreck of
colonial bankruptcies--a tea-totaller, with Pope's Essay on Man for his
consolation, in a bark hut. This "melancholy Jaques" lamented the state
of depravity to which the colony was reduced, and assured me that there
were shepherdesses in the bush! This startling fact should not be
startling, but for the disproportion of sexes, and the squatting system
which checks the spread of families. If pastoralisation were not one
thing, and colonisation another, t