At length, however, by directing their investigations towards the less submerged region of the Indian Ocean, and by sailing beyond the great eastern islands which seem to have been formerly connected with the Indian Peninsula, the Portuguese mariners were the first to descry a long line of coast which they did not doubt was that of an Austral Continent, whose satellites, so to speak, were the previously discovered islands. This supposed continent is still represented in the old maps published at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, by a mass of ill-defined contours, with this indication: Terra Australis incognita. The succeeding voyages of Carpenter, Nuyts, Tasman, and the illustrious Cook, proved that this Austral or Southern Land was in effect a continent, or, at least, an island of extraordinary dimensions, whose coasts alone—and these but a small extent inland—were inhabited by miserable tribes, with black skin, and hideous features, placed at the extreme limit which separates man from the brute. The Dutch navigators, who had first determined the principal outlines of this continent, named it New Holland, but after it passed into the hands of England, it received, as it still preserves, the appellation of Australia.
Take away from this Australian Continent its fertile districts in the south-east, where have sprung up and developed with amazing rapidity the flourishing colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, and what remains? A country entirely wild, and, one might almost venture to say, an immense Desert. The gloomy aspect and the barrenness of its northern shores, with few exceptions, had repulsed the early Portuguese and Dutch navigators, who little suspected what splendid treasures were hidden among its auriferous sands and rocks. They saw but insufficient rivers and scanty vegetation, and went no further.
None of the rivers of New Holland are navigable to any great distance from their mouths. The want of water is severely felt in the interior, where a treeless desert of sand, swamps, and jungle is intersected by streams called “creeks,” which are dry for the greater portion of the year; yet a belief long prevailed that a large sea or fresh-water lake occupied the centre—a belief founded partly on the nature of the soil, and partly on the circumstance that all the rivers that flow into the sea on the northern coast, between the Gulf of Van Diemen and Carpentaria, converge towards their sources, as if they served for drains to some large body of water.
The eastern side of the country is traversed by a great range of thinly timbered down, clothed with grasses and herbage, and rising to an elevation of 3500 feet. These are known as the Blue Mountains, and stretch from north to south over nearly thirty degrees of latitude, from Cape York to Cape Wilson. All their western slopes descend gradually towards the interior, until they are lost in the vast desert plain of the interior.
The streams which flow in this direction either pour their waters into the great rivers, such as the Darling and the Murray, which has an internal navigation of 1800 miles, or lose themselves in the marshes and lakes, which the great summer heats periodically dry up.
Another chain of mountains stretches from south to north along the western coast of Australia, from Point d’Entrecasteaux to Murchison River. A third chain, in the northern region, runs from east to west, between Camden Harbour and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The interior of the country is, as I have already indicated, in all probability an immense plain, thinly sown with trees of the two families of Acaciæ and Eucalypti, and tenanted by the wombat and the kangaroo.
Over this vast portion of Australia, which still remains a blank upon the map, numerous expeditions of discovery have been attempted since the earliest days of European colonization. Hardy pioneers—those men who are the real, but obscure, and speedily forgotten founders of empires—have sacrificed their lives in the endeavour to lay down a track across the great island-continent from north to south. Anglo-Saxon enterprise no sooner found itself securely planted on the sea-coast, than it felt that behind it lay a continent to acquire, and the indomitable instinct of the race bade it continue its mission of colonization. During the last quarter of a century, the colonial governments have liberally encouraged these explorations, and the annals of Australian discovery have been illuminated by the names of Eyre (1840), Sturt (1845), Leichardt (1846-48), Kennedy (1848), and M’Douall Stuart (1858-62), second to none among our English discoverers in patience, resolution, and heroic daring.