Stout perennial plants 60–105 cm high, often glaucous or pruinose; base thickened, pubescent. Culms simple, glabrous; nodes glabrous. Leaves usually glabrous and smooth; sheaths longer or slightly shorter than culm internodes; blade to 30 cm long, to 4 mm wide, sometimes pilose upwards from ligule, with white bladder-like vesicles. Panicles open or rather dense, 9–22 cm long, 1.5–3.5 (–5) cm wide (including awns). Glumes slightly unequal, 5.8–9 mm long, muticous or cuspidulate, 15–17-nerved, smooth, glabrous. Florets longer than glumes by up to 6 mm; lemma and palea erect and appressed or finally recurved and divergent. Lemma 10–14.5 mm long (including awn), long-acuminate into awn, cartilaginous to indurated, (sometimes obscurely) 7-nerved, bisulcate towards apex, hirsute on back in lower c. 1/2 (–2/3), glabrous and smooth or scaberulous in upper part; awn 2–4 mm long. Palea c. 11 mm long, long-acuminate into a bifid beak (awnlets c. 1 mm long), pilose or hirsute on back in lower c. half. Caryopsis 3–3.5 mm long.
A characteristic species of the grey toblack cracking clay grassland plains of the Barkly Tableland and similar areas,where plants form large stands in or near swamps, depressions, watercourses andmajor drainage channels.
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