Ixxx AN INTRODUCTORY still thouglit of Australia as a vast desert, remarkable only for containing a den of thieves and murderers, called ' Botany Bay.* "* The "vast desert^' which Englishmen used to summon up before the mind's eye whenever Australia was mentioned, re- minds one of the picture which de Brosses had drawn of the country a century before. The only essential difference between the two is that the English sketch has a den of thieves and murderers in one comer of it, while the French one has nothing but a few sickly trees to relieve its dreariness. There was some- thing in the shape of evidence to support the popular impression in England, because Sturt's theory about the great central desert had just been published at the time referred to. He made his first acquaintance with the interior when he entered the country watered by the Macquarie, Began, and Darling, a drought of three years' duration being then at its height. Looking day after day for well-watered, grassy table-lands, and finding only plains that looked '^dismally brown," where "the emus, with outstretched necks, gasping for breath, searched the channels of the river for water, in vain," he came to the conclusion that the country he saw was unfit for occupation — a desert that not even the natives would care to penetrate. But every acre of it is now, and has been for many years, under pastoral lease, roamed over by sheep and cattle in thousands, notwithstanding its want of water in dry seasons ; and the distant banks of the Darling, far beyond the limit of his exploration, have long since been con- nected with Sydney by the rail and the telegraph. In his last expedition, Sturt strove to reach the centre of the continent, the great object of his ambition ; but he was driven back by the stony desert, of which he left such a terrible picture that it filled the mind with an idea of hopeless desolation — as if the interior of the country consisted of nothing better than sandy plains and ridges, in which the only sign of life to be met with was an occasional flock of birds or a famished aboriginal. The desert that filled his heart with despair in 1844 is no more dreaded now than the barren plains in which he • Payne, The Colonies (1883), p. 106. Digitized by VjOOQIC
