CHAPTER XXII.
A GLANCE AT THE EXTENT, FORM, SOIL, CLIMATE, RIVERS, AND PRODUCTIONS OF AUSTRALIA.
AUSTRALIA is the largest island in the world, so large that it is more correctly described as an island-continent, situated between the 10th and 45th degrees of south latitude, and the 112th and 154th degrees of longitude east from Greenwich. It may be said to be nearly three thousand miles from west to east, and two thousand miles from north to south, of a nearly square form, were it not for the deep indentation formed by the great Gulf of Carpenteria. But this superficial extent, which is sometimes compared with that of other continents, affords no true index to the area really available, or ever likely to be available, for colonisation. A great portion of the interior is more hopelessly barren and impassable than the deserts of Africa, being in dry weather a hollow basin of sand, in rainy seasons a vast shallow inland sea, alternately and rapidly swelled by tropical torrents, and dried up by the tropical sun.
Comparisons are frequently instituted between the relative areas and populations of Europe and Australia; but nothing can be more fallacious or dishonest.
The resources of Australia have been as yet barely discovered; a century of active colonisation can scarcely develop them to their fullest extent. Even without the appliances of science and combined labour a vast population may be subsisted in comfort; but, without some change more extensive and material than it is possible to foresee, there can be no such dense multitudes concentrated in Australia as are found in the more civilised states of Europe, and as may be found at some future period in North America. The absence of great rivers and the means of forming inland water communication, and the quality of a great proportion of the soil, settle this point.
The surface of this island is depressed in the centre, bounded by an almost continuous range of hills and plateaux, which, varying in height from one to six thousand feet above the level of the sea, in some places approach the coast and present lofty, inaccessible cliffs to the ocean—as, for instance, the heads of Port Jackson—and in others tend toward the interior of the country, at a distance of from twenty to eighty
