Perennial plants 45–90 cm high; base bulbous, woolly. Culms branched, usually woolly or villous on lower internodes; nodes glabrous or bearded. Leaves: sheaths usually much shorter than internodes, with lower sheaths woolly or villous; blade to 7–16 cm long, to 2 mm wide, usually tuberculate or hispid with tubercle-based hairs. Panicles open, loose, (3–) 6–11 (–18) cm long, (0.8–) 1 (–2) cm wide. Glumes (4–) 5.5–8.5 mm long, muticous (rarely mucronulate), 11-nerved, smooth, glabrous. Florets shorter than glumes to 3 mm longer than glumes; lemma and palea appressed or rarely divergent. Callus entirely bearded. Lemma 5.5–8 (–9.5) mm long, acuminate, muticous (rarely cuspidate or aristulate), membranous with hyaline margins, 5 (sub 7)-nerved, without grooves, hirsute on lower 1/2–2/3 (–3/4), glabrous and scaberulous above, with ciliate submargins usually to apex. Palea entire or notched, muticous or bicuspidate, pubescent to hirsute in lower 2/3 of body, glabrous and scaberulous above. Caryopsis 2.7–3.2 mm long.
Occursmainly in arid and semi-arid areas, extending north to about the Tropic ofCapricorn. A common species of deep sands and sandy loams on dunes, sandplains andsandhills; also recorded from quartzite outcrops, sandy levees, upper marginsof saline lakes and samphire flats, interdunal swales, hard red and red-brownfine-textured soils, colluvial limestone hillslopes and lateritic gravellysandridges.
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