Over this land the winds swept and the rains fell, and, volcanic action having ceased, the mountains were denuded and their deep stores of minerals bared until gold lay about on the surface. Coal, copper, silver, tin, and iron too, were made plentifully accessible. At the same time enormous agricultural plains were formed in the interior, but under climatic conditions which allowed no development of vegetable or animal types without organised culture by a civilised people.
Nature thus seemed to work consciously for the making of a country uniquely fitted for civilisation by a White Race, whilst at the same time ensuring that its aboriginal inhabitants should not be able to profit by its betterment, and thus raise themselves to a degree of social organisation which would allow them to resist an invading White Race. In the year when Captain Cook acquired the Continent of Australia for Great Britain, it was ripe for development by civilised effort in a way which no other territory of the earth then was; and yet was so hopelessly sterile to man without machinery and the other apparatus of human science, that its aboriginal inhabitants were the most forlorn of the world's peoples, living a starveling life dependent on poor hunting, scanty fisheries and a few roots for existence.
It needs no great stretch of fancy to see a mysterious design in the world-history of Australia. Here was a great area of land stuffed with precious and useful minerals, hidden away from the advancing civilisation of man as effectually as if it had been in the planet Mars. In other parts of the globe great civilisations rose and fell—the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Greek, the Roman,—all drawing from the bowels of the earth her hidden treasures, and drawing on her surface riches with successive harvests. In America, the Mexican, Peruvian and other civilisations learned to gather from the great stocks of Nature, and built up fabrics of greatness from her rifled treasures. In Australia alone, amid dim, mysterious forests, the same prehistoric animals roamed, the same poor nomads of men lived and died, neither tilling nor mining the earth—tenants in occupation, content with a bare and accidental livelihood in the midst of mighty riches.
Australia too was not discovered by the White Man until the moment when a young nation could be founded on the discovered principles of Justice. To complete the marvel, as it would seem, Providence ordained that its occupation and development should be by the one people most eminently fitted for the founding of a new nation on the virgin soil.
The fostering care of Nature did not end there. The early settlers coming to Australia not only found that nothing had been drawn from the soil or reef, that an absolutely virgin country was theirs to exploit, but also were greeted by a singularly happy climate, free of all the diseases which afflicted older lands. Prolific Australia, with all its marvellous potentialities, lay open to them, with no warlike tribes to enforce a bloody beginning to history, no epidemics to war against, no savage beasts to encounter. And they were greeted by an energising climate which seemed to encourage the best faculties of man, just as it gave to harvests a wonderful richness and to herds a marvellous fecundity.
How it came to be that such a vast area of the earth's surface, so near to the great Indian and Chinese civilisations, should have so long remained unknown, it is difficult to understand. There is faint evidence that the existence of the great Southern continent was guessed at in very early days, but no attempt at exploration or settlement was made by the Hindoos or the Chinese. When the Greeks, who had penetrated to India under Alexander the Great, returned to their homes, they brought back some talk of a continent south from India, and the later Greek literature and some Latin writers have allusions to the tale. Marco Polo (thirteenth century), during his voyages to the East Indies, seems to have heard of a Southern continent, for he speaks of a Java Major, a land much greater than the isle of Java (which he knew), and which was probably either New Guinea or Australia. On a fifteenth-century map of the world now in the British Museum there are indications of a knowledge of the existence of Australia; and it is undoubtedly included in a map of the world of the sixteenth century.
But there was evidently no curiosity as to the suspected new continent. Australia to-day contains not the slightest trace of contact with ancient or Middle Ages civilisation. Exploration was attracted to the East Indies and to Cathay by the tales of spices, scents, gold, silver, and ivory. No such tales came from Australia. It was to prove the greatest gold-producing country of the world, but its natives had no hunger for the precious metal, though it was strewn about the ground in great lumps in some places. Nor did sugar, spice, and ivory come from the land; nor, indeed, any product of man's industry or Nature's bounty. Wrapped in its mysterious grey-green forests, protected by a coast-line which appeared always barren and inhospitable, Australia remained unknown until comparatively modern times.
In 1581 the Spaniards, under Magalhaes, reached the Philippine Islands by sailing west from the South American coast. In the nature of things their ships would have touched the coast of Australia. In 1606 De Quiros and De Torres reached some of the Oceanian islands, and named one Terra Austrialia del Espiritu Santo", (the Southern Land of the Holy Spirit). As was the case with Columbus in his voyage of discovery to America, De Quiros had not touched the mainland, but his voyage gave the name "Australia" to the new continent.
The English were late in the work of exploring the coast of Australia, though as far back as 1624 there is a record of Sir William Courteen petitioning King James I. for leave to plant colonies in "Terra Australis." In 1688, William Dampier, in the Cygnet, touched at the north-western coast of Australia. The next year, in H.M.S. Roebuck, he paid a visit to the new land, and, on returning to England, put on record his impressions of its fauna and flora. It was in 1770 that Captain Cook made the first landing at Botany Bay.
The British nation at the time could find no use for Australia. Annexed in 1770 it was not colonised until 1787, when the idea was adopted of using the apparently sterile and miserable Southern continent as a depôt for enforced exiles. It was a happy chance that sent a "racketty" element of British social life to be the first basis of the new Australian population. The poachers, English Chartists, Irish Fenians, Scottish land rebels (who formed the majority of the convicts sent to Australia) were good as nation-building material.