Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land: With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration, and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of AmericaWentworth, W. C. (William Charles)
History
Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land: With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration, and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America
Wentworth, W. C. (William Charles)
New South Wales -- Description and travel; New South Wales -- Politics and government; Tasmania -- Description and travel; Wentworth, W. C. (William Charles), 1790-1872
Land is about ten per cent. higher than at Parramatta, and is
advancing rapidly in price. This circumstance is chiefly
attributable to the small quantity of land that is to be had
perfectly free from the reach of the inundations, to which the
Hawkesbury is so frequently subject. These inundations often rise
seventy or eighty feet above low water mark; and in the instance
of what is still emphatically termed "the great flood," attained
an elevation of ninety-three feet. The chaos of confusion and
distress that presents itself on these occasions, cannot be
easily conceived by any one who has not been a witness of its
horrors. An immense expanse of water, of which the eye cannot in
many directions discover the limits, every where interspersed
with growing timber, and crowded with poultry, pigs, horses,
cattle, stacks and houses, having frequently men, women, and
children, clinging to them for protection, and shrieking out in
an agony of despair for assistance:--such are the principal
objects by which these scenes of death and devastation are
characterized.
These inundations are not periodical, but they most generally
happen in the month of March. Within the last two years there
have been no fewer than four of them, one of which was nearly as
high as the great flood. In the six years precedings there had
not been one. Since the establishment of the colony they have
happened upon an average, about once in three years.
The principal cause of them is the contiguity of this river to
the Blue Mountains. The Grose and Warraganbia rivers, from which
two sources it derives its principal supply, issue direct from
these mountains; and the Nepean river, the other principal branch
of it, runs along the base of them for fifty or sixty miles; and
receives in its progress, from the innumerable mountain torrents
connected with it, the whole of the rain which these mountains
collect in that great extent. That this is the principal cause of
these calamitous inundations has been fully proved; for shortly
after the plantation of this colony, the Hawkesbury overflowed
its banks, (which are in general about thirty feet in height), in
the midst of harvest, when not a single drop of rain had fallen
on the Port Jackson side of the mountains. Another great cause of
the inundations, which take place in this and the other rivers in
the colony, is the small fall that is in them, and the consequent
slowness of their currents. The current in the Hawkesbury, even
when the tide is in full ebb, does not exceed two miles an hour.
The water, therefore, which during the rains, rushes in torrents
from the mountains cannot escape with sufficient rapidity; and
from its immense accumulation, soon overtops the banks of the
river, and covers the whole of the low country.
LIVERPOOL.
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