DYING RIVERS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 111, 7 November 1923, Page 9

DYING RIVERS

BURIED IN SAND

SECRETS OF AUSTRALIAN WILDS.

(FROM OUK OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

SYDNEY, Ist November: Though the sun-baked wastes, tractless and awesome, which are to be found covering vast spaces in Australia, look forbidding and uninteresting to' the uninitiated observer, there are epic stories to be read there of centuries of bold struggle for supremacy between all sorts of forms of life and the remorseless sun. The very leaves of the trees whichsurvive have adapted themselves desperately to the poorer and poorer conditions from which they have had to exact sustenance, and are thin and tough, offering the greatest possible resistance to the evaporating rays. These and other evidence of the constant struggle can be seen by the casual observer, but there are other great contests going on which only scientists can tell us of, and of these not the least fascinating are the great dying rivers of Australia, to which Sir Baldwin Spencer, the famous Australian traveller and professor, alludes in some jottings which he contributed to the "Adclaido Register." "Nothing," he says, "is more striking over all the lower steppe lands that extend from Oodnadatta northwards to the central ranges than the intricate net of dead and dying rivers. They meander far and wide a s they ccme down from the ranges away to the north. The largest of them is the Finko, which, with its tributaries, the Ellery, Palmer, and Hugh, drains an area of not less than 80,000 square miles. During the winter months there are • a few widely ■scattered waterholes, but for the most part there is no surface water, and travellers or travelling stock must depend on artesian ot sub-artesian bores, wells, and soakages. The first of these may be a thousand or more feet in depth. They draw their supply from pbrous v rocks that outcrop far away on the highlands of Queensland. These rocks have a watertight lare' above and below them, and dip down id the form of a great basiii into central Australia, where the water that sinks into them accumulates under great pressure and can be tapped hundreds of miles away from its .original intake. -About fifty miles north of Oodnadatta we came across one of these bores. The water was coming up in a continuous stream at a temperature of about 120 degs., Fa'h.,and overnwed into a pool encircled with tall grass and bullrushes. But a few yards away from the. bank everything was as dry as possible, and it would take a vastly greater amount than the'bores yield to. attempt any serious irrigation. From the ordinary wells the water is pumped into tanks and then runs out into troughs. There ■is one interesting primitive form that is sometimes used in connection with a shallow well or soakage in the sandy bed of a river. If is simply the old Egyptian Saduf, and consists of a longj pole balanced on an upright fork, with a weight at one end and a bucket at the other. The soakages are very interesting, for the greater part of the year there is no sign of water in the sandbeds of the great rivers, and yet by digging down a few feet you can often get what is called a soakage. In fact^you can tap rin underground flow. It is simply the water that m flood time sank''into the sand and so was (5/jved from evaporation and now slowly trickles along under, the surface. It. is this supply that,accounts for the fringe of gum trees bordering all the rivers, and you can sometimes'trace'the roots running twenty or thirty yards from a tree un£il it dips down into tlie .sandy; bed: . . At the present day the, rainfall is totally insufficient to - account for the size of. these-river-beds, but ages ago they flowed into' 1 Lake Eyre 6ver a fertile country covered with rich vegetation among' which browsed great marsupials. At that time crocodiles and turtles and quaint lung fishes swam in the waters. •