On his first voyage, in 1770, Cook had some grounds for the belief that Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then called, was a separate island. The observations of Captain Furneaux, however, did not strengthen this belief, and when making his final voyage, the great navigator appears to have definitely concluded that it was part of the mainland of Australia. This continued to be the opinion of geographers until 1798, when Bass discovered the strait which bears his name. The next recorded expedition is a memorable one in the annals of Australian history—the despatch of a British colony to the shores of Botany Bay. The fleet sailed in May 1787, and arrived off the Australian coast early in the following January.
2. Inland Exploration.
For a period of twenty-five years after the first establishment of a British settlement in Australia, the colonists were only acquainted with the country along the coast extending northwards about 70 m. from Sydney and about a like distance to the south and shut in to the west by the Blue Mountain range, forming a narrow strip not more than 50 m. wide at its broadest part.
The Blue Mountains attain a height of between 3000 and 4000 ft. only, but they are intersected with precipitous ravines 1500 ft. deep, which baffled every effort to reach the interior until in 1813, when a summer of severe drought had made it of vital importance to find new pastures, three of the colonists, Messrs Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, more fortunate than their predecessors in exploration, after crossing the Nepean river at Emu Plains and ascending the Dividing Range, were able to reach a position enabling them to obtain a view of the grassy valley of the Fish river, which lies on the farther side of the Dividing Range. The western descent of the mountains appeared to the explorers comparatively easy, and they returned to report their discovery. A line of road was constructed across the mountains as far as the Macquarie river by the surveyor, Mr Evans, and the town of Bathurst laid out. This marks the beginning of the occupation of the interior of the continent. Some small expeditions were made from Bathurst, resulting in the discovery of the Lachlan, and in 1816 the first of the great exploration expeditions of Australia was fitted out Oxley. under Lieutenant Oxley, R.N. Oxley was accompanied by Mr Evans and Mr Allan Cunningham the botanist, and the object of his expedition was to trace the course of the Lachlan in a westerly direction. Oxley traced the river until it lost itself in the swamps east of 147° E., then crossing the river he traversed the country between the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee as far as 34° S. and 144° 30′ E. On his return journey Oxley again crossed the Lachlan about 160 m., measured along the river, below the point where he left it on his journey south. Continuing in a north-easterly direction Oxley struck the Macquarie river at a place he called Wellington, and from this place in the following year he organized a second expedition in hopes of discovering an inland sea. He was, however, disappointed in this, as after descending the course of the Macquarie below Mount Harris, he found that the river ended in an immense swamp overgrown with reeds. Oxley now turned aside—led by Mr Evans’s report of the country eastward—crossed the Arbuthnot range, and traversing the Liverpool Plains, and ascending the Peel and Cockburn rivers to the Blue Mountains, gained sight of the open sea, which he reached at Port Macquarie. A valuable extension of geographical knowledge had been gained by this circuitous journey of more than 800 m. Yet its result was a disappointment to those who had looked for means of inland navigation by the Macquarie river, and by its supposed issue in a mediterranean sea.
During the next two or three years public attention was occupied with Captain King’s maritime explorations of the north-west coast in three successive voyages, and by explorations of Western Australia in 1821. These steps were followed by the foundation of a settlement on Melville Island, in the extreme north, which, however, was soon abandoned. In 1823 Lieutenant Oxley proceeded to Moreton Bay and Port Curtis, the first place 500 m., the other 690 m. north of Sydney, to choose the site of a new penal establishment. From a shipwrecked English sailor he met with, who had lived with the savages, he heard of the river Brisbane. About the same time, in the opposite direction, south-west of Sydney, a large extent of the interior was revealed. Messrs Hamilton Hume and Hovell set out from Lake George, crossed the Murrumbidgee, and, after following the river for a short distance, struck south, skirting the foothills of what are now known as the Australian Alps until they reached a fine river, which was called the Hume after the leader’s father. Crossing the Murray at Albury, the explorers, bearing to the south-west, skirted the western shore of Port Philip and reached the sea-coast near where the town of Geelong now stands. In 1827 and the two following years, Cunningham prosecuted instructive explorations on both sides of the Liverpool range, between the upper waters of the Hunter and those of the Peel and other tributaries of the Brisbane north of New South Wales. Some of his discoveries, including those of Pandora’s Pass and the Darling Downs, were of great practical utility.
By this time much had thus been done to obtain an acquaintance with the eastern parts of the Australian continent, although the problem of what could become of the large rivers flowing north-west and south-west into the interior was still unsolved. With a view to determine this question, Darling.Governor Sir Ralph Darling, in the year 1828, sent out the expedition under Captain Charles Sturt, who, proceeding first to the marshes at the end of the Macquarie river, found his progress checked by the dense mass of reeds in that quarter. He therefore turned westward, and struck a large river, with many affluents, to which he gave the name of the Darling. This river, flowing from north-east to south-west, drains the marshes in which the Macquarie and other streams from the south appeared to be lost. The course of the Murrumbidgee, a deep and rapid river, was followed by the same eminent explorer in his second expedition in 1831 with a more satisfactory result. He travelled on this occasion nearly 2000 m., and discovered that both the Murrumbidgee, carrying with it the waters of the Lachlan morass, and likewise the Darling, from a more northerly region, finally joined another and larger river. This stream, the Murray, in the upper part of its course runs in a north-westerly direction, but afterwards turning southwards, almost at a right angle, expands into Lake Alexandrina on the south coast, about 60 m. south-east of the town of Adelaide, and finally enters the sea at Encounter Bay in E. long. 139°.
After gaining a practical solution of the problem of the destination of the westward-flowing rivers, Sir Thomas Mitchell, in 1833, led an expedition northward to the upper branches of the Darling; the party met with a sad disaster in the death of Richard Cunningham, brother of the eminent Mitchell.botanist, who was murdered by the blacks near the Bogan river. The expedition reached the Darling on the 25th of May 1833, and after establishing a depot at Fort Bourke, Mitchell traced the Darling southwards for 300 m. until he was certain the river was identical with that reported by Sturt as joining the Murray about 142° E.
Meantime, from the new colony of Adelaide, South Australia, on the shores of Gulf St Vincent, a series of adventurous journeys to the north and to the west was begun by Mr Eyre, who explored a country very difficult of access. In 1840 he performed a feat of extraordinary personal daring, Eyre.travelling all the way along the barren sea-coast of the Great Australian Bight, from Spencer Gulf to King George Sound. Eyre also explored the interior north of the head of Spencer Gulf, where he was misled, however, by appearances to form an erroneous theory about the water-surfaces named Lake Torrens. It was left to the veteran explorer, Sturt, to achieve the arduous enterprise of penetrating from the Darling northward to the very centre of the continent. This was in 1845, the route lying for the most part over a stony desert, where the heat (reaching 131° Fahr.), with scorching winds, caused much suffering to the party. The most northerly point reached by Sturt on this occasion was about S. lat. 24° 25′.
