gained, after crossing the mouth of North-west Bay, is Oyster Cove, nearly opposite Barnes Bay, of North Bruni.
The French expedition had called it the Bay of Oysters. The water is so shallow that the little pier can only be reached at high tide. Mr. John Helder Wedge told me that he had a saw-mill there in 1830. A very expensive and profitless Probation penal settlement was existing there for seven years. A reserve of 1,700 acres was proclaimed, though the native reserve is 1,000 acres.
It is not a very attractive place for farmers, the soil being heartlessly barren, though, a few miles further, the traveller passes valleys of surpassing richness. The timber, however, is of gigantic growth. Eucalypti, of the gum-tree kind, run up to 300 feet. I have measured sixty feet round the butt of a tree in the forest near. To the westward of the Cove is the track to the Huon, where a clergyman discovered a gum-tree which was 330 feet to the summit, and 106 feet in circumference at a height of six feet from the ground. Myrtles towered there 150 feet. The Banksia contended with the Xanthorrhoea, or grass-tree, for the possession of desolate spots, while the Epacris and Kennedia sought the humbler levels. The Tasmanian lily (Blandifordia) hung out its bells of orange and scarlet in cool and moistened nooks. The Waratah, or Telopea, threw out its gorgeous crimson blossoms from the mountain heights overlooking the Cove, and attracting the Aborigines to the charming gullies beneath, where sparkling waters trickled by the stems of romantic fern-trees.
The Geology of the Cove may be briefly described. Immediately round the station the rocks are the argillaceous contemporaries of the palæeozoic limestones of Hobart Town, and abound in pectens, spirifers, terebratulæ, &c. A slaty porphyry transmutes this bed in the neighbourhood. In the north and south the basalt encroaches, having upon it the soil so dear to the eye of an agriculturist Southward of the cove, along the channel, bituminous coal deposits are bordered by greenstone floors, and lie upon ancient slates. Greenstone and basalt are opposite the cove upon the shore of Bruni Island, where, also, the coal reappears. To the rear of the cove rises the massive Wellington range, a monument of past igneous action, on whose sides respectively the basalt and greenstone tower as columnar pillars, or repose as Titanic blocks.
