negative.

After I had surveyed extensive tracts of territory I never could separate
the question respecting the course of any river from that of the
situation of the higher land necessary to furnish its sources and confine
its basin. I could not entertain the idea of a river distinct from these
conditions, so necessary to the existence of one; and it appeared to me
that if a large river flowed to the north-west of any point north of
Liverpool plains its sources could only be sought for in the Coast Range
in the opposite direction; or to the eastward of these plains.

Various rivers were known to arise on that side of the Coast Range; the
streams from Liverpool plains flowing northward; the Peel, the Gwydir,
and the Dumaresq, arising in the Coast Range, and falling, as had been
represented, to the north-westward. I proposed therefore to proceed
northward, or to pursue such a direction as well as the nature of the
country permitted, so that I might arrive, on the most northern of these
streams, and then, keeping in view whatever high land might be visible
near its northern banks, to trace the river's course downwards, and thus
to arrive at the large river, or common channel of all these waters.

The second condition necessary to the existence of a river, namely, the
higher land enclosing its basin, might, in this case, have been either
Arbuthnot's Range, or that between the Darling and the Lachlan; and this
seemed to me to involve a question of at least equal importance to that
of the river itself, for, had the fall of all the waters above-mentioned,
been to the north-west, it was obvious that such a range must have been
the dividing ridge or spine connecting the eastern and western parts of
Australia, and which, when once investigated was likely to be the key to
the discovery of all the rivers on each side, and to the other