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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 67 of 299
Words from 18634 to 18894
of 83218
