QUEENSLAND'S HEAT.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7386, 12 February 1902, Page 2

QUEENSLAND'S HEAT.

Central Queensland is the sort of plaoe that it's best to live out of. At Eookhanipton the heat was grievous — 112deg. in the shade, but on the Western Plains it was a' few degrees hotter — a mild purgatory, in fact. If the people on the costal areas (writes the Brisbane correspondent of a Sydney paper) were kept simmering, those in the interior were all but roasted or broiled, or otherwise tried by fire. Old residents aver that Buch heat was never experienced before, and hope that they may never live to experience the same again. In the Parcaldine district 400 sheep died from the effects of the heat, and in the vicinity of Longreach numbers of birds dropped expiring from the trees. If birds and beasts suffered like this, what must have been the plight of the men, women, and children ? The collective thirst in Baroaldine and Longreach must have been appalling. On Meteor Downs, in the Springsure distriot, native bears and jackasses were seen to fall 'dead from their perches on the trees. At Springwood, in the same district, the heat cracked the glasses in a house, and melted the glue in the chairs, while in the adjacent bush the birds and native bears dropped dead. At Giera, on the Central Railway, a few miles east of Barcaldine, 123 heat-killed wild ducks were counted on a lagoon, and hundreds of smaller birds were found on the ground. The condition of things was so desperate at Killarney, on tbe Alice River, that flocks of birds took shelter in the house and outbuildings of a settler, many varieties that he had never seen before seeking shelter. The premises were simply besieged by these unusual visitors, whose natural timidity or dread of man seemed quite forgotten in their mad flight for shelter anywhere from the burning heat. Everywhere in these torrid parts of the State — places as bitterly cold in winter as it is fiercely hot in summer — the animal and the vegetable kingdoms were submerged in the fearful heat waves.