With What Keenness I Entered Into The Preparations May Be Well Imagined,
For Now At Last I Was In A Position To Undertake The Expedition I Had So
Long In My Mind.
In order to explain what my object was, and what my plan
of procedure was to be, it will
Be necessary to give a short sketch of the
history of exploration and advance of settlement in Western Australia.
The Colony, occupying one third of the continent, has an extreme length of
1,500 miles and a breadth of one thousand miles. The length of coast-line
exceeds three thousand miles. A most noticeable feature of the coast-line
on the South is the entire absence of rivers - for nearly seven hundred
miles no rivers or even watercourses are met with. Along the Western coast
rivers are fairly frequent, the largest being the Swan, Murchison,
Gascoyne, Ashburton, the Fortescue, and De Grey. The Swan, on which the
capital is situated, is the most important - the rivers North of this are
not always running, the seasons in the country where they rise being very
unreliable. Further North again, where Warburton's Desert abuts on the
sea, we find an inhospitable sandy beach (the Eighty-mile Beach), along
which no river mouths are seen. In the far North, the Kimberley Division,
the coast-line is considerably indented by bays, gulfs, and the mouths of
rivers of fair size, which run for the greater part of the year; of these
the most important are the Fitzroy, Lennard, Prince Regent, and Ord. The
Colony can boast of no great mountain ranges, the highest, the Darling
Range, being something over 2,000 feet. The Leopold range in the north is
of about the same altitude. No mountain chain breaks the monotony of the
central portions of the Colony. In the interior hills are called
mountains, and a line of hills, ranges, for want of a better name.
The first settlement was formed on the Swan River in 1826, and gradually
spread to the South and North, until to-day we find the occupied portion
of the Colony extending along the western seaboard for about 1,200 miles,
with an average breadth of perhaps two hundred miles. In the North the
occupied country is confined to the watersheds of the two main rivers,
the Fitzroy and the Ord.
To the Eastward of Perth the populous mining towns and many scattered
mining camps and settlements extend some five hundred miles towards the
interior. In spite of the discovery of gold and the advance of the Colony
in every way, there still remains more than half the province unoccupied.
How scattered the population of the settled country is may be judged from
the fact that the average population is one individual to every six square
miles. The vast, almost unknown, interior well merits its designation of
"Desert," and I suppose that in few parts of the world have travellers
had greater difficulties to overcome than in the arid, sun-dried
wilderness of interior Australia.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 73 of 244
Words from 38052 to 38557
of 127189
