SUBTERRANEAN RIVERS IN AUSTRALIA.

Wairoa Bell, Volume V, Issue 183, 3 February 1893, Page 3

SUBTERRANEAN RIVERS IN AUSTRALIA.

A writer in the Queenslander gives a picturesque sketch of some of the great artesian wells which are taming whole territories of waterless desert into valuable pastures. The north-western and central districts of Queensland and New South Wales are becoming a network of artesian waters. The writer describes the bores on a single inn, the Warenda ; the bores are from twelve to fifteen miles distant frem each other, and their depths range from 340 feet to 733 feet. The water struck is always pure and sweet, and sometimi s rises to a temperature of over 100 degrees. The volume of water poured out is amazing ; a single bore, for example, yielding 7-50.000 gall ns a day. A traveller across the brown plains, where the veiy atmosphere seems to vibrate with heat pulsations, sees a pure white column showing like a pillar of ice against the sky. It is the jet of an artesian well ! The waters of two bores at one point touch, making a running stream over thirty miles long; at other points the artesian jet creates and maintains a veritable lake, with curving shores sweeping through miles Very wild theories are entertained as to the source of the vast subterran an waters ef central Australia ; it is even sug gested that they are fe 1 by the vast tropical rainfall of New Guinea, or the melted snows of the remote Andes ! The rainfall of Australia itself, however, is amply sufficient to create noble rivers. Some peculiarity of geographical structure bids these flow—or rathar drift—from north to south, not in open river-channels, but in sliding and sunless floods deep down below the surface. The artesian wells prick these vast reservoirs of hidden waters stored in the tilted strata, and bid them flow once more in the sunlight, and by their beneficient alchemy turn the desert into a garden. The arles : an wells of central and northern Australia are really adding new provinces of enormous value to the colonies ■ they may even in time create a new climate and a new fauna and flora !