My most worthy friend, Mr.
Charles Campbell, and my companion Mr. John Browne, and his brother, both
occupy the most distant stations to the north. Mr. Campbell has one of
the finest cattle runs in the province, and my comrade, I believe, is
perfectly satisfied with his run. The condition of their cattle and sheep
would at all events lead to the conclusion, that neither suffer from the
nature of the water they drink or the pasture on which they feed.

As regards the general appearance of the wooded portion of the province,
I would remark, that excepting on the tops of the ranges where the
stringy-bark grows; in the pine forests, and where there are belts of
scrub on barren or sandy ground, its character is that of open forest
without the slightest undergrowth save grass. The trees are more or less
numerous according to the locality, as well as more or less umbrageous, a
character they generally have on river flats, but the habit of the
eucalyptus is, generally speaking, straggling in its branches. In many
places the trees are so sparingly, and I had almost said judiciously
distributed as to resemble the park lands attached to a gentleman's
residence in England, and it only wants the edifice to complete the
comparison.

The proportion of good to bad land in the province has generally been
considered as divisible into three parts; that is to say, land entirely
unavailable--land adapted for pastoral purposes only, and land of a
superior quality. On due consideration, I am afraid this is not a correct
estimate, but that unavailable country greatly preponderates over the
other two. If, in truth, keeping the distant interior entirely out of
view, and confining our observations to those portions of the colony into
which the settlers have pushed in search for runs, we look to the great
extent of unavailable country between the Murray and the Mount Gambier
district, along the line of the Murray belt, and the extensive tracts at
the head of the Gulfs, we shall find that South Australia, from the very
nature of its formation, has an undue proportion of waste land. Those
parts, however, which I have mentioned as being unavailable, were once
covered by the sea, and could hardly be expected to be other than we now
see them, and it may, therefore, be questioned how far they ought to be
put into the scale. In this view of the matter, and taking the hilly
country only into account, the proportion of unavailable and of pastoral
land may