CHAPTER II

STURT CREEK AND “GREGORY’S SALT SEA”

The Sturt Creek presents many points of interest.  It rises in the Northern Territory, runs for nearly three hundred miles in a South-Westerly direction, and comes to an end in a large salt-lake, across the border, in the desert.  It runs throughout its entire length once in every three or four years, though each yearly rainy season floods it in certain parts.  In the dry season one might in many places ride right across its course without being aware of it.  In the wet season such parts of it are swamps and marshes, over which its waters spread to a width of five and six miles.  Permanent pools are numerous, and occur wherever a ridge of sandstone rock runs across the course of the creek.  On either side of the creek fine grass-plains spread East and West.  The further South the creek goes, the less good is the country on the East side; presently there is no grass country except on the West side.  Not far below the station the creek is joined by the Wolf, which, like all Kimberley creeks, is fringed with gums, Bauhinia, and Leichardt-trees.  From the confluence downwards a war between the grass-lands and the desert is waged for the supremacy of the river-banks.  For miles the sandy channel, cut out like a large drain through the country, less than one chain wide in places, is hemmed in on either side by desert gums and spinifex, and once out of sight of the creek the surrounding land receives no benefit from the water.

But lower down again, about the latitude of Mount Mueller, the grass plains gain the day; and a very pretty bit of country they form too, especially when the creek is running, as it was when we were there.  In many places its waters had overflowed the banks, expanding into clay-pans and lagoons of beautiful clear water where teal and whistling duck disported themselves.

The Wolf rises on the opposite slope of the watershed to Christmas Creek and the Mary River, and floods twice or thrice a year.  Below its junction with the Sturt the combined creek takes on itself the character of the Wolf, and at the point of confluence the Sturt may be said to end.  Seeing how seldom the Sturt runs its entire length and how small its channel is at this point, smaller than that of the Wolf, I think that it is to the latter that the lakes (Gregory’s “Salt Sea”) chiefly owe their existence.  However that may be, the combined waters fill but an insignificant channel and one can hardly credit that this creek has a length of nearly three hundred miles.

On nearing the lakes the creek assumes so dismal an appearance, and so funereal is the aspect of the dead scrub and dark tops of the “boree” (a kind of mulga), that one wonders that Gregory did not choose the name of “Dead” instead of merely “Salt Sea.”  A curious point about this lower part of the creek is, that stretches of fresh and salt water alternate.  The stream, as we saw it, was only just running in the lower reaches; in places it ran under the sandy bed, and in this part the salt pools occurred.  First we passed a stretch of clear, brackish water, then a nearly dry reach of sand, then a trickle of fresh water lasting for a hundred yards or so; this would again disappear, and be seen lower down as another salt pool.