By The Luckiest Chance A Boat Happened To Be At The Beach, And The Officers And Crew Rescued The Boy.

The following day a party led by Jacky returned to where poor Kennedy lay, and they buried him.

They obtained his books and maps from the tree where Jacky had hidden them. The narrative of this expedition is heart-rending. Of the whole number of the whites, namely seven, two only were rescued by the vessel at a place where Kennedy had formed a depot on the coast, and left four men.

With Captain Roe, a companion of King's, with whom he was speared and nearly killed by the natives of Goulburn Island, in 1820, and who afterwards became Surveyor-General of the colony of Western Australia, the list of Australia's early explorers may be said to close, although I should remark that Augustus Gregory was a West Australian explorer as early as the year 1846. Captain Roe conducted the most extensive inland exploration of Western Australia at that day, in 1848. No works of fiction can excel, or indeed equal, in romantic and heart-stirring interest the volumes, worthy to be written in letters of gold, which record the deeds and the sufferings of these noble toilers in the dim and distant field of discovery afforded by the Australasian continent and its vast islands. It would be well if those works were read by the present generation as eagerly as the imaginary tales of adventure which, while they appeal to no real sentiment, and convey no solid information, cannot compete for a moment with those sublime records of what has been dared, done, and suffered, at the call of duty, and for the sake of human interests by men who have really lived and died. I do not say that all works of fiction are entirely without interest to the human imagination, or that writers of some of these works are not clever, for in one sense they certainly are, and that is, in only writing of horrors that never occurred, without going through the preliminary agony of a practical realisation of the dangers they so graphically describe, and from which, perhaps, they might be the very first to flee, though their heroes are made to appear nothing less than demigods. Strange as it may appear, it seems because the tales of Australian travel and self-devotion are true, that they attract but little notice, for were the narratives of the explorers NOT true we might become the most renowned novelists the world has ever known. Again, Australian geography, as explained in the works of Australian exploration, might be called an unlearned study. Let me ask how many boys out of a hundred in Australia, or England either, have ever read Sturt or Mitchell, Eyre, Leichhardt, Grey, or Stuart. It is possible a few may have read Cook's voyages, because they appear more national, but who has read Flinders, King, or Stokes? Is it because these narratives are Australian and true that they are not worthy of attention?

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