The proportion of bad soil to that which is good in New South Wales, is certainly very great:  I mean the proportion of inferior soil to such as is fit for the higher purposes of agriculture.  Mr. Dawson, the late superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company’s possessions, has observed, as a singular fact, that the best soil generally prevails on the summits of the hills, more especially where they are at all level.  He accounts for so unusual a circumstance by the fact, that elevated positions are less subject to the effects of fire or floods than their valleys or flanks, and attributes the general want of vegetable mould over the colony chiefly to the ravages of the former element, whereby the growth of underwood, so favourable in other countries to the formation of soil, is wholly prevented.  Undoubtedly this is a principal cause for the deficiency in question.  There is no part of the world in which fires create such havoc as in New South Wales and indeed in Australia generally.  The climate, on the one hand, which dries up vegetation, and the wandering habits of the natives on the other, which induce them to clear the country before them by conflagration, operate equally against the growth of timber and underwood.

Cause of this.

But there is another circumstance that appears to have escaped Mr. Dawson’s observation; which is the actual property of the trees themselves, as to the quantity of vegetable matter they produce in decay.  Being a military man, I cannot be supposed to have devoted much of my time to agricultural pursuits; but it has been obvious to me, as it must have been to many others, that in New South Wales, the fall of leaves and the decay of timber, so far from adding to the richness of its soil, actually destroy minor vegetation.  This fact was brought more home to me in consequence of its having been my lot to spend some months upon Norfolk Island, a distant penal settlement attached to the Government of Sydney.  There the abundance of vegetable decay was as remarkable as the want of it on the Australian Continent.  I have frequently sunk up to my knees in a bed of leaves when walking through its woods; and, often when I placed my foot on what appeared externally to be the solid trunk of a tree, I have found it yield to the pressure, in consequence of its decomposition into absolute rottenness.  But such is not the case in New South Wales.  There, no such accumulations of vegetable matter are to be met with; but where the loftiest tree of the forest falls to the ground, its figure and length are marked out by the total want of vegetation within a certain distance of it, and a small elevation of earth, resembling more the refuse or scoria of burnt bricks than any thing else, is all that ultimately remains of the immense body which time or accident had prostrated.  Thus it would appear, that it is not less to the character of its woods than to the ravages of fire that New South Wales owes its general sterility.