In the whole history of man’s development a more sudden revolution is not known than that which has happened in Australia during this century.
At the centennial festival celebrated last year in Australia it was prophesied that one hundred years hence Australia will be a federal republic with 50,000,000 English-speaking inhabitants, who, sprung from the same race as that which gave birth to the Americans, will have developed into a new but easily recognisable type, resembling but yet differing from their Yankee cousins. The motto of the Australians is “Advance Australia!” They have proved that they have been able to carry out this maxim in the past and they will not fail to do so in the future.
II
GEOLOGY
Australia may be compared to a gigantic plate. The interior part is flat, moderately high (300 to 2150 feet), and the elevation increases toward the edges. The raised edge of this plate is in the south-east, where we find the highest summit in Australia, Mount Townsend, in Kosciuszko Range, which is 7059 feet high. The edge of the plate has a very marked character on the east coast, where a continuous though not very high chain of mountains stretches from Victoria through the eastern part of New South Wales and Queensland to the York peninsula, which bounds on the east the great Gulf of Carpentaria. This whole mountain chain is embraced by the Australian geographers (e.g. G. Sutherland) in the term “The Great Dividing Range,” the separate parts of which have separate names. In the boundary between Victoria and New South Wales it is called the Australian Alps, and west of Sydney the Blue Mountains.
Round the lower part of the Gulf of Carpentaria and in a part of the south coast of Australia the “plate” has no edge, and low and flat country stretches here from the sea far into the interior. On the other hand an elevation is found in the “bottom of the plate” in Central Australia, but this elevation nowhere reaches 3000 feet.
Australia has no streams to be compared with the great rivers of other countries, a fact due to the scarcity of rain. The largest stream is Murray river, which empties itself into the sea on the south coast. With its tributaries it drains a country as large as the triangle formed by North Cape, Christiania, and St. Petersburg. During the rainy season the lower part of Murray river is navigable.
Australia consists of primitive rock, granite, gneiss, and silurian rock—that is to say, very old formations, and nearly identical with those of the Scandinavian peninsula.
There are many coal-bearing strata in Queensland and in the north-eastern part of New South Wales; thus Australia, in addition to its other mineral wealth, also possesses “black diamonds.” In many places strata from the mesozoic period of the earth’s history have been found.
The shell given below, of which I found a large number lying in sandstone near Minnie Downs 400 miles west from Rockhampton, is a gigantic Inoceramus from the cretaceous period. I gave this fossil to the mineralogical cabinet in Christiania University, and it has been described by the Swedish Professor Bernh. Lundgren, who is an authority in this field of science.
