232 TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA. 



Austral Continent, whose satellites, so to speak, were the previously 

 discovered islands. This supposed continent is still represented in the 

 old maps published at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning 

 of the eighteenth centuries, by a mass of ill-defined contours, with this 

 indication : Terra Australis incognita. The succeeding voyages of 

 Carpenter, Nuyts, Tasman, and the illustrious Cook, proved that this 

 Austral or Southern Land was in effect a continent, or, at least, an 

 island of extraordinary dimensions, whose coasts alone and these 

 but a small extent inland were inhabited by miserable tribes, with 

 black skin, and hideous features, placed at the extreme limit which 

 separates man from the brute. The Dutch navigators, who had first 

 determined the principal outlines of this continent, named it New 

 Holland, but after it passed into the hands of England, it received, 

 as it still preserves, the appellation of Australia. 



Take away from this Australian Continent its fertile districts 

 in the south-east, where have sprung up and developed with amazing 

 rapidity the flourishing colonies of New South "Wales, Victoria, and 

 Queensland, and what remains? A country entirely wild, and, one 

 might almost venture to say, an immense Desert. The gloomy aspect 

 and the barrenness of its northern shores, with few exceptions, had 

 repulsed the early Portuguese and Dutch navigators, who little sus- 

 pected what splendid treasures were hidden among its auriferous sands 

 and rocks. They saw but insufficient rivers and scanty vegetation, 

 and went no further. 



None of the rivers of New Holland are navigable to any great 

 distance from their mouths. The want of water is severely felt in 

 the interior, where a treeless desert of sand, swamps, and jungle is 

 intersected by streams called "creeks," which are dry for the greater 

 portion of the year; yet a belief long prevailed that a large sea or 

 fresh-water lake occupied the centre a belief founded partly on the 

 nature of the soil, and partly on the circumstance that all the rivers 

 that flow into the sea on the northern coast, between the Gulf of 

 Van Diemen and Carpentaria, converge towards their sources, as if 

 they served for drains to some large body of water. 



