SAND AND ROCK.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 24 July 1925, Page 6

SAND AND ROCK.

VVESTRALIAN DESERT EXPLORED. TRYING TRIP IN A TRACTOR. The mystery of the gritty, droughtsmitten waste of spinifex-dotted; sand and rock that forms the great desert basin of Westralia was revealed at Wellington by Mi 1 . E. G. Clapp, an eminent visiting geologist, who traversed it in the fruitless search for oil. The journey was made by motor tractor, which travelled the rough country well on its caterpillar wheels, smashing through the thinner scrub and climbing the immense sandhills of the interior satisfactorily, though it broke down in the end, and the party were rescued by camel. The inner blacks still are dangerous, and there was the ever-present danger of not finding springs of water. “More hostile than the Sahara” was the lecturer’s descrip, tion of the country, which he said would never support a population, though north and south of it were comparatively fertile districts. Starting on the beach at Broome, which has a. tidal ris e and fall of some thirty feet, leaving vessels of all toirnage stranded at low tide, the speaker, by means of excellent lantern slides, took his hearers inland. Th e sandhills of the coastal district, the coastal plain, the hill ranges, and th© basin, with, plateaus very little above sea level, were traversed in turn. The party had a warlike aspect, each carrying a rifle and revolver, and quite an important member of the party was the dog. which kept watch against surprise in the night by -black fellows. The country, so far as it is inhabited nearer the coast, is by the owners of cattle stations, who live many miles apart. It was a dry season, there having been no rain the year before, and only some thirty drops in six months. Between the flies and the ants the party had rather an unenviable experience. All wore goggles and fly veils, hut the persistent flies got inside the goggles, which had to be taken off every now and then to remove them! They passed great sea-level plains, covered with tho most recent forms of fossil shells, and here and there an occasional antheap, some of the latter of considerable size. Then came the “pindan,” the sparsely wooded brush of the desert country, on the outskirts of which were fairly thick growths of larger trees, known as water trees, because sometimes water was found near them. The “pindan” could be got through l>y the tractor steering wide of the larger sticks, but the sharp roots, especially where the brush had been burnt off, played havoc with the tires, some days being little better tfiaii puncture-repairing drill, with very little progress. The “pindan” extended 1 for som 6 150 miles. Some 853 miles! from Broome they struck the great escarpment, which reaches 300 feet high, and which can only he scaled on foot every twenty miles or so, while it was quite impossible even in the broken places to get through it by wheeled vehicle. It runs for hundreds of miles. These rocks are a soft grade sandstone, some 10,000 to 15,000 feet in thickness, without any appearance of shale, and it was no use to look there for oil. Along the base of the escarpment, and sometimes well up it, were waterholes, mostly in the shape of potholes, some of them twenty feet deep. One of these was on the edge of a canyon 150 feet deep, showing the sandstone to be fairly impervious to water. There wer© snakes at every waterliole. and at one of them there was a particularly vicious one, which chased the water-getter regularly. Beyond the escarpment was fairly good gra,s« land —when it rained —and here the presence of pandanus palms generally showed water. The blackfeMows, however, could not rely on surface water, as the “springs” (mere seeps) were often sanded over, and so they dug “soaks,” burrows like a rabbit hole, barely big enough to allow the body of a white man to pass, often twenty feet deep, and with turns and twists in them, burrowing still deeper when the water receded in the dry seasons. BlackfelLows were necessary as guides, hut they were very treacherous, and every time a sandhill had to he ci imbed, in the tractor, look-outs were sent ahead to see that the coast was clear. To go to sleep at night without a watch vras to court a surprise attack; they never feared one while awake, so cowardly were the aboriginals. Sheep runs in New Zealand of some 2000 acres would pay well enough, said Sir. Clapp, but in the north-west of Australia at least 100,000 acres was needed, and some of the successful runs and cattle stations were 500,000 acres in extent, and needed all the country to make a living. In the north there was comparatively fertile country that would well repay settlement, but in the great desert the rainfall did not average more than an inch or two in a year. The Canning cattle route, skirting the desert on the east and south from the more fertile north, was surveyed as a route for the droving of cattle for sal e in Perth. The first drove came through safely, hut on the next the leader was killed and the cattle were lost, and How it was seldom traversed, as being too dangerous by reason of the blacks. Every party had some trouble there. The centre of the. desert had a tremendous thickness of sandstone rock, from 12.000 to 15,C00 feet deep, and the possibility of sinking artesian wells there was remote. Along the coastlin c the sandhills, running all jn a singularly uniform westerly direction, had water in the shoreward hollows, which ©ould he reached by wells. In the more fertile basin lying inland from Point Headland there was a true artesian formation, and here the climate' was not so trying on families as in the hotter northern desert- basin, while everybody was more prosperous.