Australia may be compared to a gigantic plate. The interior part is fiat, moderately high (300 to 2150 feet), and the elevation increases toward the edges. The raised edge of this plate is in the southeast, where we find the highest summit in Australia, Mount Townsend, in Kosciuszko Range, which is 7059 feet high. The edge of the plate has a very marked character on the east coast, where a continuous though not very high chain of mountains stretches from Victoria through the eastern part of New South Wales and Queensland to the York peninsula, which bounds on the east the great Gulf of Carpentaria. This whole mountain chain is embraced by the Australian geographers (e.g. G. Sutherland) in the term “The Great Dividing Range,” the separate parts of which have separate names. In the boundary between Victoria and New South Wales it is called the Australian Alps, and west of Sydney the Blue Mountains.

Round the lower part of the Gulf of Carpentaria and in a part of the south coast of Australia the “ plate” has no edge, and low and flat country stretches here from the sea far into the interior. On the other hand an elevation is found in the “ bottom of the plate”’ in Central Australia, but this elevation nowhere reaches 3000 feet.

Australia has no streams to be compared with the great rivers of other countries, a fact due to the scarcity of rain. The largest stream is Murray river, which empties itself into the sea on the south coast. With its tributaries it drains a country as large as the triangle formed by North Cape, Christiania, and St. Petersburg.