Nammoy, Peel, Gwydir, and Darling; on which rivers the runs will always
make cattle fat. There are two shrubs palpably salt, and, perhaps, there
is something salsolaceous in the herbage also on which cattle thrive so
well; and the open plains and muddy waterholes are their delight.
Excessive drought, however, may occasionally reduce the owners of such
stock to great extremities, and subject them to serious loss. The Acacia
pendula, a tree whose HABITAT is limited and remarkable, is much relished
by the cattle. It is found only in clay soils, on the borders of plains,
which are occasionally so saturated with water as to be quite impassable;
never on higher ground nor on any lower than that limited sort of
locality, in the neighbourhood of rivers which at some seasons overflow.
In such situations, even where grass seems very scarce, cattle get fat;
and it is a practice of stockmen to cut down the Acacia pendula (or Myall
trees, as they call them) for the cattle to feed on.

At this sheep station where we had encamped, I met with an individual who
had seen better days, and had lost his property amid the wreck of
colonial bankruptcies--a tea-totaller, with Pope's Essay on Man for his
consolation, in a bark hut. This "melancholy Jaques" lamented the state
of depravity to which the colony was reduced, and assured me that there
were shepherdesses in the bush! This startling fact should not be
startling, but for the disproportion of sexes, and the squatting system
which checks the spread of families. If pastoralisation were not one
thing, and colonisation another, the occupation of tending sheep should
be as fit and proper for women as for men. The pastoral life, so
favourable to love and the enjoyment of nature, has ever been a favourite
theme of the poet. Here it appears to be the antidote of all poetry and
propriety, only because man's better half is wanting. Under this
unfavourable aspect the white man first comes before the aboriginal
native; were the intruders accompanied by women and children, they could