APPEN DIX. 



THE GROWTH OF POPULATION TO THE YEAR 1891. 



~^HE history of exploration in Australasia is also the history of the expansion of 

 settlement, the development of the Continent's resources, and the growth of popu- 

 lation. The early colony was shut in and circumscribed by the apparently impassable 

 escarpment of the Blue Mountains. The settled portion of the known Australian conti- 

 nent was represented by a part of the county of Cumberland on its eastern coast, and 

 for a period of about a quarter of a century after the arrival of the " First Fleet " 

 man sat down dismayed before the blue-looming barrier that cut him off from the 

 smiling plains and rich pasturage that stretched for fertile leagues into the luxuriant 

 country beyond the bold bastion of the Great Divide. Again and again he essayed its 

 conquest. Settlement spread slowly from the coast to the feet of the mighty hills but 

 spread no farther. Rewards were offered for the discovery of even a sheep-walk ; but 

 every effort to storm the citadel of the mountains ended in a repulse. Foveaux des- 

 pairingly wrote that the colony could never become of very great importance Nature 

 had too rigidly defined its boundaries ; once the limit was reached of production in 

 Cumberland's fertile county progress was eternally barred, and settlement must stand still 

 for ever. But in the year 1813 the mountain heights were captured, and a glimpse 

 flashed on the mental vision of the men of that time of boundless possibilities for 

 the future of development and expansion immeasurable. From now henceforth march 

 through the pages of Australian history, achieving conquest upon conquest, those 

 pioneers of settlement -the explorers. Fast in their wake follow the flocks and herds, 

 drought-driven, of the early squatters. The boundaries spread out before the ever-swelling 

 stream of enterprise, the horizon widens, the massy wall of forest-growth falls to the 

 music of the settler's axe, the shy natives fall back yet further into the dim recesses 

 of the bush, and the silent and leafy wilderness disappears to make place for the 

 clearings, the smiling farms, the fruitful gardens and orchards, the mills of miller and 

 sawyer, the villages and towns and complex civilization and organized society of a later 

 date. 



Australasia began in a little penal settlement on the shores of Port Jackson some- 

 what over a hundred years ago. A little more than a thousand prisoners and soldiers 

 all told formed the nucleus of a southern empire which to-day contains close on four 

 million souls. During the lapse of that century Australasia has in her experience epito- 

 mized the progress of ages. In one hundred years this latest comer among nations has 

 bridged the gulf separating the earliest days of rude and adventurous settlement from 

 the modern time of advanced progress, replete with all the appliances that characterise 

 the civilization of the seon-historied lands beyond the seas. And this compressed historic 

 life comprised within the brief period of a little over a century is a survey of the 

 history of the earth, or rather of the annals of man upon its surface. The earliest 



