It’s easy to see the grain of the Mulga Lands country from space. The Warrego and Paroo rivers drain down the grain. The road from Cunnamulla to Eulo runs across the grain over the watershed dividing the two rivers.

The role that mulga has long played as a landscape marker across the region is strikingly described in an article from 1898. Here a correspondent notes that when travelling west across the watershed:

"Heretofore we had been running, as it were, alongside the Warrego in country which was pretty well flat. Now we began to come across what is the standard tree of the district-that is mulga.

We saw both the dwarf and the tree mulga, and we saw what a valuable factor it was in keeping stock alive.

Ever since 1890 there has been no important summer rainfall in the district, and except at one or two places the country was destitute of grass, sheep and cattle being kept alive by the herbage and the mulga.

Cattle seem particularly to thrive on the mulga, and they keep themselves alive by it during the very worst of weather.

After, crossing the stream the country may be all characterised as low flat country, the view being broken only by the mulga bushes. The ground being extremely hard, when the rain falls it has a tendency to rush away rapidly, and form large sheets of water, which extend all over the country."

Extracts from Queensland Government notes on the management of mulga regrowth included below give us a valuable insight into the key features of mulga.

In the Mulga Lands Bioregion, mulga is the most prominent woody plant, forming a canopy between about 2 and 14 m tall, often with other trees or shrubs.

Eucalypts like poplar box, silver-leaved ironbark and gum-barked coolibah or forest-gum are important canopy species in more productive areas. Other eucalypts that occur in mulga country include yapunyah and napunyah and river red gum.

Canopy cover can vary from 20 – 80%. It is found on red earth plains, sandplains or on harder shallow soils.

Mulga is one of Australia’s most iconic and widespread species, occurring in every mainland Australian state except Victoria.

In Queensland, mulga is characteristic of a wide range of arid and semi-arid vegetation communities, from low and open shrublands on stony soils, to open-forests ten or more metres tall that occupy deep soils on extensive red earth plains.

It often co-occurs with eucalypts, other acacias and various other arid shrubs and trees. Mulga has its stronghold in the Mulga Lands in Queensland’s southwest but it also extends north through the western Mitchell Grass Downs and west into the Channel Country.