190 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



ascertaining whether a harbour existed on the Gipps- 

 land coast, where a depot could be formed. A company- 

 was formed, and a vessel chartered. They were suc- 

 cessful in finding a harbour, but unsuccessful in finding 

 a stock route. But they made two discoveries — they 

 first beheld the Latrobe River and Lake Wellington. 

 The expedition cost £2,000.* 



As Sir George Gipps stated, and Sir George Grey 

 explains, the class of Overlanders was called into exist- 

 ence by peculiar and, we may add, temporary circum- 

 stances. There were new colonies — Victoria, South 

 AustraHa, and, later, Queensland — to be stocked ; new 

 stations in the mother-colony to be formed ; and old 

 stations to be replenished. Or, sometimes, a station- 

 owner would substitute sheep for cattle or cattle for 

 sheep. And this continued till the Colony had been 

 stocked, M'hen the Overlander necessarily disappeared, 

 or was transformed into a cattle-dealer. 



The Overlanders were usually single men in the prime 

 of youth, says Grey, and certainly most of them in the 

 early days, when he was acquainted with them, were 

 comparatively young. If they were not, all of them, 

 " remarkable men," as he affirms, at least they needed 

 no little grit. Their toilsome journeys were often over 

 snow-clad mountains, through drought-stricken, grassless 

 plains, across swollen, and hardly fordable rivers, en- 

 during hunger and thirst and lack of all things, in perils 

 oft, but keeping ever a light heart, and seldom needing 

 to appeal to the unjaelding will that lay behind and at 

 the bottom of their cheery spirits. 



Grey picturesquely imagines a man of this class and 

 type who had finished one long overlanding journey 

 and was prepared to essay another. Ill-clad and un- 

 impressive, he enters a company of heavily bearded, 

 weather-beaten men. They take little notice of him. 

 Then, joining in their conversation, he proposes a new 

 and practicable route for stock, and declares his willing- 

 ness to undertake a trip over it. All are instantly 

 • Beodbibb, pp. 95, 20, 24, 45, 51. 



