Page:EB1911 - Volume 22.djvu/749

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QUEENSLAND
  

hall which also does duty as a town hall. A Carmelite friary was converted into an Episcopal chapel in 1890. There is a large oil-works in the parish. Dalmeny House, the seat of the earl of Rosebery, lies in beautifully wooded grounds about 2 m. E. of the ferry. In the park, on the seashore facing Drum Sands, stands Barnbougle Castle, a building of unknown age which became the seat of the Mowbrays in the 12th century. After passing into the hands of the earls of Haddington, it was purchased in 1662 by Sir Archibald Primrose, an ancestor of the earl of Rosebery. The castle was thoroughly restored in 1880. Dundas Castle, 11/2 m. S. of Queensferry, was a seat of the Dundases from 1124 to 1875, was besieged in 1449, received a visit from Cromwell in 1651 and was partly rebuilt about 1850. Hopetoun House, nearly 3 m. W. of the ferry, was begun about 1696 from the plans of Sir William Bruce of Kinross and completed by Robert Adam. It is the seat of the marquess of Linlithgow. Abercorn, a little to the west, gave the title of duke to a branch of the Hamiltons. It was the site of an ancient monastery, and from 681 to 685 the see of the earliest bishopric in Scotland.


QUEENSLAND, a state of the Australian commonwealth occupying the whole of the north-eastern portion of the Australian continent, and comprising also the islands in Torres Strait. (For map, see Australia.) It lies between 10° and 29° S., and is bounded on the N. by Torres Strait and the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the W. by South Australia and the Northern Territory, on the S. by New South Wales and on the E. by the Pacific Ocean. It has an area of 668,497 sq. m., a coastline of 3000, is 1250 m. long and 950 m. wide at its widest part.

With so extensive a seaboard Queensland is well favoured with ports on the Pacific side. Moreton Bay receives the Brisbane river, on whose banks Brisbane, the capital, stands. Maryborough port is on the Mary, which flows into Wide Bay; Bundaberg, on the Burnett; Gladstone, on Port Curtis; Rockhampton, up the Fitzroy (Keppel Bay); Mackay, on the Pioneer; Bowen, on Port Denison; Townsville, on Cleveland Bay. Cairns and Port Douglas are near Trinity Bay; Cardwell is on Rockingham Bay; Cooktown, on the Endeavour; Thursday Island port, near Cape York; and Normanton and Burketown near the Gulf of Carpentaria. The quiet Inner Passage, between the shore of the Great Barrier Reef, 1200 m. long, favours the north-eastern Queensland ports. Brisbane was founded in 1826, but colonization was restricted until 1842, when the Moreton Bay district of New South Wales was thrown open to settlers. It was named “Queensland” on its separation from the mother colony in 1859. A broad plateau, from 2000 to 5000 ft. in height, extends from north to south, at from 20 to 100 m. from the coast, forming the Main Range. The Coast Range is less elevated. A plateau goes westward from the Great Dividing Range, throwing most of its waters northward to the gulf. The Main Range sends numerous but short streams to the Pacific, and a few long ones south-westward, lost in earth or shallow lakes, unless feeding the river Darling. Going northward, the leading rivers, in order, are the Logan, Brisbane, Mary, Burnett, Fitzroy, Burdekin, Herbert, Johnstone and Endeavour. The Fitzroy receives the Mackenzie and Dawson; the Burdekin is supplied by the Cape, Belyando and Suttor. The chief gulf streams are the Mitchell, Flinders, Leichhardt and Albert. The great dry western plains have the Barcoo, Diamantina, Georgina, Warrego, Maranoa and Condamine.  (T. A. C.) 

Geology.—Queensland consists geologically of three areas. The eastern division of the state, including all the Cape York Peninsula and the mountainous areas behind the coast, is occupied by the Queensland Highlands, which are built up of a foundation of Archean and contorted Lower Palaeozoic rocks, upon which rest some sheets of comparatively horizontal Upper Palaeozoic and Mesozoic rocks. The rocks of the Highlands sink to the west below the Western Plains, which consist in the main of a sheet of Cretaceous clays, capped by isolated ridges and peaks of Desert Sandstone. In the far west the plains end against the foot of an Archean tableland, which is the north-eastern projection of the Western Plateau of Australia.

The oldest rocks in Queensland are gneisses and schists, which appear to underlie the whole of the state. They were originally regarded as metamorphosed Silurian rocks, which had been converted into gneiss, mica-schists and hornblende-schists. Their Silurian age was affirmed owing to their lithological resemblance to rocks in Victoria, which were then regarded as Silurian, but have since been shown to be Archean. The gneisses and schists occupy the Barklay Tableland, the Cloncurry Goldfield and the rocks of the Mackinlay district in the west of the state. The second chief Archean area is around Charters Towers and the Cape Goldlieid; it includes quartzites, conglomerates and slates, striking from north-west to south-east. The third Archean area occupies the Gilbert, Woolgar and Etheridge Goldfields, and is composed of schists trending from west to east, and with dikes of diorite and quartz-porphyry. Smaller Archean outcrops occur south of Bowen in the Clarke Range and on the Peak Downs. To the Archean series doubtless belong some of the many granitic massifs, including those of Charters Towers, Ravenswood and Croydon; but some of the granitic rocks are of Lower Carboniferous age, and some are apparently Mesozoic.

The Lower Palaeozoic sedimentary rocks are widely distributed, but owing to the rarity of fossils they are not well known. In the south-west of Queensland there are some Ordovician rocks, the eastern continuation of those in the Macdonnell Ranges. Silurian limestones occur in the mining field of' Chillagoe and at Mount Wyatt. The Upper Palaeozoic systems are well developed, even when many of the schists, which have been included in the Devonian, are eliminated. The Middle Devonian is represented by the Burdekin limestones, which contain a rich fossil fauna corresponding to the Buchan and Bindi limestones of Victoria. The Middle Devonian limestones occur on the Marble and Hunter Islands in the Northumberland Archipelago. The Devonian rocks in the Pentland and Gilbert district are estimated by lack to be over 20,000 ft. in thickness; but they probably include some Lower Palaeozoic beds.

The Queensland Carboniferous system is divided into five series—the Gympie, Star and the three divisions of the Bowen beds. The lowest series is the Gympie, which occurs between Brisbane and Maryborough. It consists of shales and sandstones, and is traversed by dikes of diorite, which often contain pyrites and gold. The age of these gold-bearing rocks is proved by the presence of such fossils as Productus cora and Protoretepora ampla. The Gympie series is well developed in the districts of Burnett, Broad Sound Bay and Wide Bay, along the coast from Port Curtis to the south of Cape Palmerston. The Gympie beds are greatly contorted; and those of the Star series are regarded as younger, because they are less disturbed. They are best known in the basins of the Great and Little Star rivers, tributaries of the Upper Burdekin. They are best developed on the Belyando river and in the Drummond Range, where the shales and sandstones yield abundant fossil fish; on the Star river the shales contain Lepidodendron. The Bowen beds are divided into three series which represent the upper part of the Carboniferous. The Lower Bowen series consists of agglomerates and altered rocks exposed in the Toussaint Range; farther south, the Lower Bowen beds consist of grits, sandstones and shales, which have been altered by some granitic intrusions. The Middle Bowen series contains beds with Productus cora and Glossopteris. The Upper Bowen beds contain coal seams, abundant remains of Glossopteris and one marine band. They form the centre of the basin of the Bowen coalfield; while the Middle Bowen beds outcrop in a band around it. The Upper Bowen beds occur also at Townsville and Cooktown in Northern Queensland.

The rocks of the Mesozoic group may be divided into two divisions, of which the lower includes terrestrial deposits containing coal seams; the upper is mainly a marine formation, but it terminates with a further development of terrestrial deposits. The Lower Mesozoic division includes the Burrum and Ipswich series. The Burrum series occurs along the eastern coast from Laguna Bay, through Wide Bay and Maryborough, to Blackwater Creek; and it extends inland for about 30 m., where it is faulted against the Gympie beds. The western edge of the Burrum beds are described as highly altered in places, by contact with granites. The Ipswich series occupies 12,000 sq. m. in the south-eastern corner of Queensland, and is the northern continuation of the Upper Clarence series of New South Wales. It contains coal seams which have been worked, though the coal is of inferior value to that of the Carboniferous of New South Wales. One seam, on Stewarts Creek, near Rockhampton, is 26 ft. thick. Interbedded basalts occur in the Ipswich beds, forming the scarp of the Toowoomba Range. The Burrum and Ipswich beds have been included in the Trias and the Jurassic, or in both systems as the Trias-Jura, but according to A. C. Seward their characteristic fossil, Taeniopteris daintreei, is of Lower Oolitic age.

The Cretaceous system is represented by a lower group of marine clays forming the Rolling Downs formation. They are said to rest conformably upon the Ipswich beds, and some of the fossils found in these beds were first described as Upper Oolitic. The affinities of the fauna are in part with Lower Cretaceous and in part with the Cenomanian; so both these series may be represented. The Rolling Downs formation consists in the main of clays, forming the