Two decades of Australian history closed with the deposition of Governer Bligh; a third opened and ended with a ruler who has left his name to rivers and harbors, capes and mountains, hospitals, jails, and roads, - Lachlan Macquarie. Upon his reign, which extended from 1809 to 1821, we must dwell with more detail, as it was marked by the clear presentation of problems, geographical and social, which are not yet wholly solved. We will first state what these problems were, and how they came to be presented; and afterwards attempt to show in how far, and in what manner, they have as yet been answered. And, first, as to the geographical. The general outlines of Australia, as we have said, had been ascertained before the time of Cook. That great sailor added to what had been known before a running survey of the Eastern shore north of Botany Bay. But when the convict-colony was founded in 1788, no one knew that Tasmania was a separate island, and the southern shores of Australia had never been examined with any degree of thoroughness. In 1797, however, there came into the sphere of southern research one who explored with such perseverance and wrote so ably, that his name ought to be scientifically sanctified in the annals of the Australian Academy, - Lieut. Flinders. As midshipman, he, together with Surgeon Bass, in 1789, explored in small and leaky boats the straits which bear the name of the adventurous doctor; and toward the close of the same year, while Washington was consolidating our Union, and the ruler of Britain's empire was unable to rule his own mind even, and the court of France had gone crazy with royal banquets and its people with king-conquering mobs, —just then, when the women of Paris led Louis prisoner, Flinders and Bass made themselves ready for the trip which, in a few weeks, demonstrated the geographical independence of Tasmania. But the career of Flinders did not end, it only commenced, with the discovery of Tasmania's isolation; this merit was recognized by the powers at home, and in 1801, with John Franklin, whose name, like a vast aurora borealis, now fills the world's horizon, as his subordinate, he began the survey of Australia's southern coast. During that During that survey, he discovered the whole of what is now known as the South Australian shore, Spencer Gulf, the Gulf of St. Vincent, and Encounter Bay. And yet those discoveries were almost unwelcome; for the word had gone abroad, no one knew whence, that a vast strait of the ocean passed from the great Australian bight, the Gulf of Carpentaria; and each voyager hoped along that strait to find the Mexico or Peru of New Holland. This strait vanished before our discoverer, and the interior of the southern continent yet remained a mystery. It was not, however, without a struggle that Flinders abandoned the discovery of the reputed passage. In 1802, renewed and strong, he sailed northward, and strove to find, in the vast bay of Carpenter, some opening which would make accessible the treasures of the interior; but he found, we regret to say, only mud, -infinite flats, and shallows, and bars, and swamps, of mud. Many years passed, and that strange interior was still unknown. The colony of New South Wales had been, meanwhile, drunken with rum and convicts; staggering along from 1788 till 1813, and yet no one had been able to penetrate the rugged and precipitous range of the Blue Mountains, the highest peaks of which are less than one hundred miles from Sydney. But at length, in 1813, came a season of unusual drought. The pastures which lay along the Hawkesbury, the Nepean, and their tributaries, close to the original settlements, were dried up; and as grazing had become the chief occupation of many of the leading agriculturists, it became a most important point to learn what chance for cattle and sheep there was beyond the precipitous defiles which had thus far been the western limits of the colony. Three gentlemen, one of them a barrister, undertook to explore the passes of the hills. These passes, (if such impassable ravines deserve the name,) are of the most romantic and broken character. The streams flow through valleys bounded by walls of rock, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet in height; Strzelecki * says, he was unable to extricate himself and his men from them "until after days of incessant fatigue, danger, and starvation." Mr. Dixon, the surveyor, in attempting to reach Mount Hay, immediately west of Sydney, was for four days bewildered in the labyrinth of gullies through which flow the river Grose and its branches, and * Page 57. was at length thankful to escape from them alive, leaving the mountain for some more fortunate explorer to climb. Into this wilderness of basalt and sandstone the discoverers of the interior of Australia, urged by the thought of starving herds and scant larders, trusted themselves. Before that time, the most successful attempt to pass the range had been made by Mr. Caley, a botanist, who, having at length reached a point where all around him rose naked masses of weather-stained rock, while deep chasms yawned at intervals, turned back to the abodes of civilized men in despair. But to fill an herbarium is one thing, and to save one's life and property a very different matter. The three travellers, accordingly, urged by necessity, overcame the difficulties which had daunted the botanist, and after great dangers and sufferings, reached the streams flowing westward, which pointed or led them to a country that seemed to their worn cattle and to themselves a paradise. A road was instantly commenced; the whole convict-labor of the colony was devoted to its completion; settlers with their flocks and herds crowded across the before impassable barrier; Bathurst was founded in the valley of a fine stream, named in honor of the governor, "Macquarie; and a new era seemed opening upon the Anglo-Saxon in the great island of the south. course. The country beyond the Blue Mountains having been once made known, an examination of it followed as a matter of Mr. Evans, who, as deputy of the colonial surveyor, had constructed the road over the hills, was the first to carry on the investigation, and discovered another westward-flowing river, in size and appearance resembling the Macquarie, to which was given the Governor's first name, Lachlan. But where did these streams empty? Through what regions did they run? Were there not, somewhere on their banks, natives more civilized than those which as yet had been seen? Perhaps towns, wealth, the Australian Mexico, for which all adventurers had been looking? To determine these various matters, Mr. Oxley, the surveyor-general, prepared, in 1817, The usual uncertainty of history in small matters attaches to these first explorers; Dr. Lang makes one of them, Lawson, a respectable old settler; Sturt says he was Lieutenant in the 104th regiment. Lang carries them, and soine cattle with them, over the mountains; Sturt says they turned back when in sight of the western plains. to trace the Lachlan to its mouth. But, strange to say, as he proceeded down its banks, it lessened and lessened, and dwindled away, till all its waters were lost in flooded marshes without end. The next year he tried the Macquarie, and with no better success. It did not, like the African rivers, dry up in deserts of sand, but was swallowed by what appeared to be a vast, shallow lake, covered with reeds, which made it impossible to examine its shores or learn its extent. Disappointed and astonished, the examiner turned back with the conviction, that the centre of Australia was a basin into which its interior rivers flowed, and from which they found no exit; so that the dreams of wealth, of cities, even of fine farms and countless herds, along the banks of the Macquarie and Lachlan, were forced to disappear as mere castles in the air. Nor was the experience of Mr. Oxley the sole ground of faith in respect to these central waters. The natives, in their hand-and-foot, mumbo-jumbo kind of talk, seemed to describe them; told how they were navigated by canoes, and imitated the spouting of the whales that played in them. So strong was the faith in this Mediterranean sea, that, for ten years, no farther effort was made to solve the problem as to the nature of the interior. The western slope of the mountains, which rise not far from the eastern coast, was explored by Oxley, Mechan, Hume, and Allan Cunningham, the king's botanist. The Argyle country was discovered, the heads of the Murray were crossed, the region now known as Australia Felix was traversed and its excellencies in part comprehended, while, to the north, partial surveys were made as far as Moreton Bay. Capt. King, also, during the period between Oxley's attempt to trace the interior streams in 1817, and Sturt's in 1828, began and completed his survey of the Australian shores, and especially of the northern and western coasts. To these voyages of King we shall have occasion to refer hereafter; but for the present, we wish to keep our attention and that of our readers to the problem of the interior. At length, in 1828, forty years after Sydney was founded, a second expedition was sent to inquire into the condition of that immense region in the centre of Australia, which had baffled Oxley ten years before, but into which colonists were perpetually pressing. The immediate motive for sending ex - plorers at that time was the existence of a drought which, commencing in 1826, had made new fields and streams the one necessity of life; and which also, it was supposed with reason, must have changed the condition of the marshes that had stopped the previous inquirers, even if it had not wholly dried them up. To the command of this band of investigators was appointed Captain Sturt, the most successful upon the whole, of Australian explorers. In 1828, Sturt and his conirades followed the Macquarie to where it was lost, not in an interior sea, as Oxley had supposed, but in a vast plain covered with reeds and impassable by man, a plain alternately submerged and sun-burnt. He also discovered beyond this plain a river, which he named, after the Governor who then presided in New South Wales, the Darling. The course of this river was southwest, but the little water it at that time contained was so impregnated with salt and alum that it was impossible for the party to use it, and they were forced reluctantly to turn back. The Castlereagh, a stream north of the Macquarie, and flowing in nearly the same direction, northwest, was next examined and traced to the Darling. Thus much having, with great trouble and suffering, been learned, Sturt the next year turned his steps more to the southwest, in which direction ran the river through whose channel the Macquarie, Castlereagh, and all other streams thereabouts, as the traveller was convinced, discharged their waters. Striking the head of the Murrumbidgee, he traced that river to its junction with the Murray, followed their united waters to the union of a stream from the northeast, by him supposed to be, and which proves to be, the Darling, and thence pursued his way to Lake Alexandrina, (named after her present majesty, Victoria Alexandrina,) and across that shallow basin to the ocean. These two expeditions served to demonstrate that no great interior sea, such as had been imagined, existed in the southeastern corner of Australia; for after all his travels, Sturt had only been able to determine, half by sight and half by shrewd guesswork, the true outline of one corner of the continent. It was proved, pretty clearly, that the waters which fell upon the western slope of the mountains, that extend * Mitchell afterwards found it sweet at the same point. |