362 
PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION C. 
be within the knowledge of most of you, if not actually within the 
recollection of some, for it is now barely the human span of three 
score years and ten since the first attempt at settlement was made on 
the banks of the Brisbane River. The celebrated navigator, Captain 
Cook, had, fifty years previously, resuscitated and made seaworthy the 
wrecked “ Endeavour” on the shores of the inlet which now bears 
that name, and on which stauds the town known by the name of the 
gallant navigator, Cooktown. But that was all the settlement 
previous to the discovery of the Brisbane River by Oxley, in 1823, 
and the formation of a settlement on its banks in the following year. 
But for eighteen years thereafter it was a closely guarded gaol, the 
receptacle of the felonry of the felon population of the older and 
more southern capital and settlement; and, after being opened to free 
settlement, was for another similar period indulging in infantile- 
prattle and adolescent indiscretion — a dependency of a dependency — 
until, at the close of 1859, it attained an incipient majority, and 
became established in December of that year as a separate and 
independent colony, on which Her Most Gracious Majesty was pleased 
to confer her own Royal title, and over which a Governor-in-Chief and 
Captain- General and Vice-Admiral of the same was appointed, 
together with all the paraphernalia of an Executive Council and two 
houses of Legislature. 
It is difficult at any time to predict the future of the most 
ordinary avocations of a people who are living under usual and 
ordinary conditions, but much more so of those which are extraordi- 
nary, and of a people who have been transplanted to a tropical 
climate, and under conditions essentially different to any previously 
experienced. Such avocations are those required in the development 
of the hidden mysteries of the earth, which it is the especial province 
of the geologist and the miner to develop ; but, whilst such develop- 
ment can be carried on with ease and certainty iu countries with a 
settled population and all the means of civilisation at hand, it is quite 
another matter to explore a terra incognita , whose nerve-centre and 
only source of vitality is a penal settlement. Hence it will easily be 
believed that for the first twenty years little or nothing was done in 
that direction, although an extent of unexplored territory lay behind 
them which was beyond the conception of those whose ideas were 
limited by the distance of “ Land’s End to John o’ Groats,” or by 
“St. David’s Head to Great Yarmouth,” or by any other insignificant 
distance ; for the British Empire, in the fullest extent of its home 
possessions, including the united dominions of the Heptarchy, the 
Scots, Celts, and whatever other independent islanders there may 
have been in the early history of mining in those islands, did not in 
the gross represent a tenth part of the extent of territory then 
awaiting development ; for we had not then been 41 cribb’d, cabin d, 
and confined” within the narrow bounds of the South Pacific and the 
29th parallel of latitude and 138th meridian of longitude, but might 
have roamed unmolested, except by the aboriginal lords of the soil, 
over what is now the northern portion of New South Wales, as well 
as over that extensive territory lying west of our boundary, and now 
known as the Northern Territory of the colony of South Australia. 
But, even within the prescribed limits of the colony of Queens- 
land, comprising about 428,000,000 acres, we have at the present 
