Aboriginal Rock Painting on the Glenelg River. From a photograph by F.S. Brockman.
The party left Wyndham on Cambridge Gulf and proceeded first southwards and then to the westward to the Charnley River, which had been discovered by Frank Hann. The tributary waters of the Glenelg and Prince Regent Rivers, and the tidal rivers that flow into Collier and Doubtful Bays were also visited, and Brockman traced the Roe River from its source to its outflow in Prince Frederick Harbour. The Moran River was discovered, and its whole course traced to the mouth in the same inlet. The head waters of the King Edward River were discovered at the watershed; and this river was again met lower down and its course traced to its exit. Portions of the shores of Admiralty Gulf, Vansittart, and Napier Broome Bay were closely examined with a view to selecting a suitable port for the district. The most important practical result of the expedition was the discovery of an area of six million acres of basaltic pastoral country covered with blue grass, Mitchell and kangaroo grasses, and many varieties of what is known as top feed. No auriferous country was found, but some fine specimens of the baobab tree were seen, some of them averaging fifty feet in diameter.
Typical Australian Explorers of the early Twentieth Century.
We have now turned the last page of the story of those bold spirits who played no mean part in the making of Australasia by exploring the continent. For nearly a century and a quarter the white man had been restlessly searching out and traversing every square mile of the land, and now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, his work is finished. And throughout the long struggle it had ever been a stubborn conflict between the explorer and the inert forces of Nature. Through the weary toilsome years of arduous discovery, Man and Nature had seldom marched side by side as friends and allies. When Nature posed as the explorer's friend and guide, it was often only to lure him on with a smiling face to his doom. From the days when the soldier of King George the Third went forth with his firelock on his shoulder, computing the distance he covered by wearily counting the number of paces he trudged, to the day when the modern adventurer aloft on his camel eagerly scans the horizon of the red desert in search of the distant smoke of a native fire, and then patiently tracks the naked denizen of the wilderness to his hoarded rock-hole or scanty spring, the explorer has ever had to fight the battle of discovery unaided by Nature. The aborigines generally either feigned ignorance of the nature of the country, or gave only false clues and misguiding directions. Even the birds and animals of the untrodden regions seemed to resent the advance of civilization, and to delight in leading the footsteps of the white intruder astray. Hence it was by slow degrees, by careful study of the work of his predecessors in the field, and often by heeding the warning conveyed in their unhappy fate, that the Australian explorer added to the sum of knowledge of his country, and step by step unveiled the hidden mysteries of the continent.
INDEX OF NAMES OF PERSONS.
Andrews.
Ashton.
Austin.