The Darling Downs is a farming region on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland, Australia. The Downs are to the west of South East Queensland and are one of eleven major regions of Queensland.
The region was named after the then Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling by Allan Cunningham, an early Australian explorer.
The landscape is dominated by rolling hills covered by pastures of many different vegetables, legumes and other crops including cotton, wheat, barley and sorghum. Between the farmlands there are long stretches of crisscrossing roads, bushy ridges, winding creeks and herds of cattle. There are farms with beef and dairy cattle, pigs, sheep and lamb stock. Other typical sights include irrigation systems, windmills serving as water well pumps to get water from the Great Artesian Basin, light planes crop-dusting, rusty old woolsheds and other scattered remnants from a bygone era of early exploration and settlement.
Read more about Darling Downs: Geography, History, Development, Attractions, In Fiction
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“Far from the sun and summer-gale
In thy green lap was Nature’s Darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray’d,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face:”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)