1827. j Terra Incognita. 79 



being permitted to sell outright, have made leases for 999 years, pocketed 

 whatever they could get for their farms in that manner, and were seen no 

 more ! Individually, I do not know whether I should be obliged to his 

 Excellency or not ; for, if he had made my father such a grant as he had 

 a right to expect, or had, long after, given me what any young man simi- 

 larly circumstanced, but then arriving from England, would have had, it is 

 most likely that I should have been " sitting under my own vine, and 

 under my own fig-tree," or hunting kangaroos, at the antipodes, instead 

 of bachelorizing in chambers, and hunting fortune, in London. 



It was about two years after our arrival in the colony that my father 

 was to have his farm measured. In the vicinity in which he had chosen 

 it, several other persons had taken theirs, and among them our friend Mr, 



IJ of Parramatta ; and as he had already occupied his a hut being 



built, and stockyards made it was constituted head-quarters. I proceeded 

 in advance with one of that gentleman's sons, who was about live years 

 older than me, and I was not more than between ten and eleven. It was 

 my first bush-ranging excursion, and I enjoyed it highly. Our destination 

 was about twenty-two miles from Parramatta, near the head of the south 

 creek, which, branching off from the Hawkesbury near Windsor, stretches 

 across the country nearly parallel to it, and is lost in a chain of ponds, very 

 near the Cow-pastures. 



Dense forests covered the ground in every direction hills and vallies 

 were alike wooded. What the pine-forests of Norway, or those of north 

 America, may be, I know not ; but of this I am confident that the im- 

 mense variety and magnificence of the native forests of New South Wales 

 cannot be surpassed. On the banks of rivers, and on the richest soils, gene- 

 rally, the graceful and luxuriant cedar preponderates ; about the creeks, 

 and in the best of what is termed forest-land, the leafy and wide-spreading 

 apple-tree grows in the greatest profusion, but intermingled with clumps of 

 black and green wattle, which exude the finest medicinal gums ; on arid, 

 stony, and barren soils the many-coated tea-tree shoots abroad its grey and 

 wiry-leafed branches. These characteristic trees are, for the most part, 

 low and broad like, and not generally larger than, the English oak ; but 

 with them, and among them, grow the majestic iron bark hard as ebony, 

 and flexible as whalebone tall as " the mast of some great ammiral '* 

 the stringy bark of equal size and of greater use, affording to the native its 

 fibrous coat for his rude canoe, and ruder hut and, to the civilized artizan, 

 its solid trunk, which he may work to any purpose. With these, again, 

 are the blue and red gums, and the mahogany-tree, of no less magnitude, 

 and with deciduous bark : forest and swampy oaks, smaller in size, but 

 not much less aspiring than their bulkier neighbours : all these are long 

 in the trunk, running from fifty to a hundred feet without a branch, and 

 then throwing out leafy masses, which almost prevent the sun's rays from 

 reaching the earth; but not to leave a meagre mass of trunks, like Brob- 

 dignagian umbrella-sticks. Smaller and more ramified trees such as the 

 apple-tree that I spoke of, and the wild cherry-tree, and others, down to 

 the smallest shrubs are commingled; and the ground below is covered 

 with strong grasses or with ferns, stunted or luxuriant, according to the 

 quality of the soil : I have met with them so high that a man could hardly 

 see over them ! Of course, of the larger species of timber, in every place, 

 some one predominates ; some like better the top of a hill, some its sides, 

 and some the valley, and some delight in the level plain. 



It is seldom that eight or ten miles can be travelled without meeting 



4 F 2 



