It May Be A Mere Coincidence, Though The Comparison Of
Dates Is A Little Startling.
All the words which one can use are, as
Boileau said, "in the dictionaries"; every writer selects and arranges
them to suit his own ideas.
But when Flinders said that the country
around Port Phillip looked "pleasing and fertile," he had seen it to
advantage. On May 1 he had climbed Station Peak, one of the You-Yang
group of mountains, and saw stretched at his feet the rich Werribee
Plains, the broad miles of fat pastures leading away to Mount Macedon,
and the green rolling lands beyond Geelong, opening to the Victorian
Western District. In May the kangaroo-grass would be high and waving,
full of seed, a wealth of luxuriant herbage, the value of which Flinders,
a country-bred boy, would be quick to appreciate. On the other side of
the bay he had climbed Arthur's Seat at the back of Dromana, saw behind
him the waters of Westernport which Bass had discovered, and traced the
curve of the coast as far into the blue distance as his eye could
penetrate. He had warrant for saying that the country looked "pleasing
and fertile." But how did Freycinet come to select those words, "un
aspect riant et fertile"? He was not there himself, and, as a matter of
probability, it seems most unlikely that such terms would occur to a
person who was there, either as applicable to the lands near Points
Nepean and Lonsdale, with their bastions of rock and ramparts of sand, or
to the scrubby and broken coast running down to Cape Otway, which, as a
matter of fact, is not fertile, except in little patches, and, even after
half a century of settlement, does not look as if it were. The conclusion
is hardly to be resisted that Freycinet thought he was safe in
appropriating, to describe land seen from seaward, terms which Flinders
had employed to describe land seen inside the port.
Three additional facts strengthen the conviction that Port Phillip was
never seen from Le Geographe, but that the statements of Peron and
Freycinet were made to cover up a piece of negligence in the exploration
of these coasts. The French, on their maps, lavishly bestowed names on
the capes, bays, and other features of the coasts seen by them. More will
be said on this subject in the next chapter. But meanwhile it is
important to notice that they gave no names to the headlands at the
entrance to Port Phillip, which are now known as Point Lonsdale and Point
Nepean. If they saw the entrance on March 30, why did they lose the
opportunity of honouring two more of their distinguished countrymen, as
they had done in naming Cap Richelieu (Schanck), Cap Desaix (Otway), Cap
Montaigne (Nelson), Cap Volney (Moonlight Head), and so many other
features of the coast? It is singular that while they named some capes
that do not exist - as, for instance, Cap Montesquieu, to which there is
no name on modern maps to correspond, and no projection from the coast to
which it can be applicable - they left nameless these sharp and prominent
tongues of rock which form the gateway of Port Phillip.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 36 of 158
Words from 18524 to 19064
of 83218
