Illustrated Australian News at KellyGang 30/8/1879
THE SADDLE, STKATHBOGIE RANGES
The district of which the subject of our illustration constitutes a little known and almost inaccessible , portion, extends from near Longwood, Euroa and Violet Town, on the Northeastern line of railway, with but few intermissions of level country, to the mountainous region of Gippsland, and is comparatively, a mighty continent of ranges of' the wildest and ruggedest character. The entire country is auriferous, and a few very small communities wring a precarious livelihood from its creeks and hill-sides. A visitor to any of these nuclei of civilisation, traversing frequented tracks, chosen for their easy gradients and freedom from heavy timber, could hardly fail to be fan pressed by the hugeness of surrounding nature but let him essay to leave the beaten path, ascend a rocky eminence, or plunge into the dim recesses of a valley, and the immense scale on which Nature has here heaped together her limitless profusion of forest, fern and undergrowth will make him feel emphatically the insignificance and helplessness of poor humanity.
During the many centuries this little world of ours was struggling from chaos towards symmetry this mazy corrugation of granite mountains has evidently been the focus of mighty volcanic agencies; and now masses of granite, heaped in wild confusion, in isolated points or in circles of boulders en closing an open space of level ground, now carpeted with ferns and graced with noble trees, where once earth fires blazed and lava boiled and bubbled — tell the old story of mute immoveable time that is always changing yet never changes. Storm and sunshine, frost, wind and weather have ground down, disintegrated and scattered the crystalline and sym metrical granitic formations; the once sharp facets are blunted and blurred by climatic influences.
Dame Nature has been gentle, and draped them in their decay with heir most glowing products of many-colored mosses and parasitic plants. The valleys and slopes are densely covered with the all pervading Eucalyptus, but not near so gigantic as their compeers of Dandenong and Fernshaw districts. The consciousness is not op pressed by the impossibility of seeing the sky save by an almost perpendicular glance, but rather invited to a frequent regard of glimpses of distance and widely extended panoramic views, for which the rocky and comparatively barren character of many of the summits offer magnificent opportunities. From some of these elevations the eye wanders over an extent of country that is perfectly be wildering in its vastness. Range after range in almost countless serrations, fading in the dim distance into the mighty snow capped peaks of the Gippsland mountains.
Unfortunately, every picture has its reverse. This wildly-beautiful country is the haunt and refuge of a party of the most daring and desperate ruffians that have over held a district in awe and set the whole machinery of society, with all its force of troopers, detectives and police, at defiance. These fellows have passed their lives in explorations of the unknown parts of the country, and many a fairy nook hitherto sacred from human eye has been utilised as a corral for stolen horses or cattle by these desperadoes. Parties of police and black trackers have scoured the ranges in all directions hitherto without success. Our engraving shows one of their supposed sanctuaries — a wilderness of stony precipices, honeycombed with caves and chasms, far from all human habitation, and its very existence almost unknown ; it is a natural fortress, thus far unsubjugated - a Patmos sacred to unpunished crime.
| ! | The text has been retyped from a microfiche copy of the original. We have taken care to reproduce this document but areas of the original text may been damaged. |
