The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 Part 5

We have now seen how Oxley, prevented from following the river down by an overflow amongst the marshes, turned south-west, only to be driven back by impenetrable scrubs and general aridity. He struck north, with the hope of shortly regaining the too well watered country he had left. The fixed idea of the utterly useless nature of the country is ever present in his mind as he proceeds. On the 21st June he writes:--

"The farther we proceed north-westerly the more convinced I am hat for all the practical purposes of civilised man the interior of this country, westward of a certain meridian, is uninhabitable, deprived as it 5 of wood, water and gra.s.s."

A sweeping and hasty condemnation this, considering that he threshold of the interior had been scarcely more than crossed.

On the 23rd of June the travellers suddenly and unexpectedly came upon the river again, an incident, as the leader says, little expected by any one.

The next day they started once more to follow down the stream, with brighter hopes of better success, until, on the 7th of July, progress was once more arrested, and Oxley turned back recording in his journal:--

"It is with infinite regret and pain that I was forced to come to the conclusion that the interior of this vast country is a marsh, and uninhabitable."

The party now retraced their steps to the eastward, disgusted with the want of success that had attended their efforts, and the dreary monotony of their surroundings.

"There is a uniformity in the barren desolateness of this country which wearies one more than I am able to express. One tree, one soil, one water, and one description of bird, fish, or animal prevails alike for ten miles and for one hundred. A variety of wretchedness is at all times preferable to one unvarying cause of pain or distress."

On the 4th of August, being then satisfied of their position on the river, and knowing that a further course along its bank would only lead them amongst the swamps that had stayed their downward journey, it was determined to strike to the northeastward, in order to avoid this low country and, if possible, reach the Macquarie River and follow it up to the settlement of Bathurst. After experiencing some difficulty in manufacturing a raft out of pine logs, whereby to cross their baggage over, Oxley and his party left the Lachlan.

They endured for some time a repet.i.tion of their struggles in the south for gra.s.s and water, and then the explorers reached fertile and well-watered country; and, on the 19th of August, halted on the bank of the Macquarie, which river Oxley found to equal his fondest hopes. They now turned their steps homeward, and arrived at Bathurst on the evening of the 29th of August.

Convinced that, in the Macquarie, he had now discovered the highway into the interior, Oxley writes:--

"Nothing can afford a stronger contrast than the two rivers, Lachlan and Macquarie; different in their habit, their appearance, and the sources from which they derive their waters, but, above all, differing in the country bordering on them; the one constantly receiving great accession of water from four streams, and as liberally rendering fertile a great extent of country, whilst the other, from its source to its termination, is constantly diffusing and diminis.h.i.+ng the waters it originally receives over low and barren deserts, creating only wet flats and uninhabitable mora.s.ses, and during its protracted and sinuous course, is never indebted to a single tributary stream."

Oxley having successfully carried through the Lachlan expedition, was at once selected to command a similar one down the Macquarie, on which, now that the former river had so disappointed expectations, men's hopes were fixed. Oxley seems to have been particularly unhappy in his deductions, every guess hazarded by him as to the future utility of the country he pa.s.sed over, or the probable nature of the farther interior, was incorrect; and now the Macquarie was to refuse to bear his boat's keel to the westward; after the same manner as the Lachlan.

In those days men had not yet mastered the idea that the physical formation of Australia was not to be worked out on the same lines as that of other countries; they looked vainly for a river with a wide and n.o.ble opening, and none being found on the surveyed coast, conjecture placed it far away in a few leagues of unexplored sh.o.r.e line on the north-west. The constancy with which the southern coast had been examined, precluded all idea from men's minds that the entrance to this long sought river was there. No, it must be yet undiscovered to the westward. Wentworth says:--

"If the sanguine hopes to which the discovery of this river (the Macquarie) has given birth, should be realised, and it should be found to empty itself into the ocean on the north-west coast, which is the only part of this vast island that has not been accurately surveyed, in what mighty conceptions of the future greatness and power of this colony, may we not reasonably indulge? The nearest distance from the point at which Mr. Oxley left off, to any part of the western coast, is very little short of two thousand miles. If this river, therefore, be already of the size of the Hawkesbury at Windsor, which is not less than two hundred and fifty yards in breadth, and of sufficient depth to float a seventy-four gun s.h.i.+p, it is not difficult to imagine what must be its magnitude at its confluence with the ocean: before it can arrive at which it has to traverse a country nearly two thousand miles in extent. If it possess the usual sinuosities of rivers, its course to the sea cannot be less than from five to six thousand miles, and the endless accession of tributary streams which it must receive in its pa.s.sage through so great an extent of country will without doubt enable it to vie in point of magnitude with any river in the world."

It may, therefore, well be imagined that it was in a most sanguine spirit that Oxley undertook his second journey.

As before, a party had been sent ahead to build boats, and get everything in readiness, and, on the 6th June, 1818, he started on his second expedition into the interior. He had with him, as next in command, the indefatigable Evans, Dr. Harris, who volunteered, Charles Frazer, botanist, and twelve men, eighteen horses, two boats, and provisions for twenty-four weeks.

On the 23rd of the month, having reached a distance of nearly 125 miles from the depot in Wellington Valley, without the travellers experiencing more obstruction than might have been expected, two men, Thomas Thatcher and John Hall, were sent back to Bathurst with a report to Governor Macquarie, as had been previously arranged.

No sooner had the two parties separated, one with high hopes of their future success, the others bearing back tidings of these confident hopes, than doubt and distrust entered the mind of the leader. In his journal, written not twenty-four hours after the departure of his messengers, he says:--

"For four or five miles there was no material change in the general appearance of the country from what it had been on the preceding days, but for the fast six miles the land was very considerably lower, interspersed with plains clear of timber, and dry. On the banks it was still lower, and in many parts it was evident that the river floods swept over them, though this did not appear to be universally the case... .

These unfavourable appearances threw a damp upon our hopes, and we feared that our antic.i.p.ations had been too sanguine."

In his after report to the Governor, forwarded by Mr. Evans to Newcastle, he writes:--

"My letter, dated the 22nd June last, will have made your Excellency acquainted with the sanguine hopes I entertained from the appearance of the river, that its termination would be either in interior waters or coastwise. When I wrote that letter to your Excellency, I certainly did not antic.i.p.ate the possibility that a very few days farther travelling would lead us to its termination as an accessible river."

So short-lived were the hopes he had entertained.

On the 30th June, after, for many days, finding the country becoming flatter and more liable to floods, Oxley found himself almost hemmed in by water, and had to return with the whole party to a safer encampment, where a consultation was held. It was decided to send the horses and baggage back to Mount Harris, a small elevation some fifteen miles higher up the river, whilst Oxley himself, with four volunteers and the large boat, proceeded down the river, taking with them a month's provisions.

During his absence, Mr. Evans was to proceed to the north-east some sixty miles, and return upon a more northerly course, this being the direction the party intended taking if the river failed them.

Let us see how Oxley fared.

"July 2. I proceeded down the river, during one of the wettest and most stormy days we had yet experienced. About twenty miles from where I set out, there was, properly speaking, no country; the river overflowing its banks, and dividing into streams, which I found had no permanent separation from the main branch, but united themselves to it on a mult.i.tude of points. We went seven or eight miles farther, when we stopped for the night, upon a s.p.a.ce of ground scarcely large enough to enable us to kindle a fire. The princ.i.p.al stream ran with great rapidity and its banks and neighbourhood as far as we could see, were covered with wood, inclosing us within a margin or bank, vast s.p.a.ces of country clear of timber were under water, and covered with the common reed, which grew to the height of six or seven feet above the surface. The course and distance by the river was estimated to be from twenty-seven to thirty miles, on a north-west line.

"July 3rd. Towards the morning the storm abated, and at daylight we proceeded on our voyage. The main bed of the river was much contracted, but very deep, the waters spreading to a depth of a foot or eighteen inches over the banks, but all running on the same point of bearing. We met with considerable interruption from fallen timber, which in places nearly choked up the channel. After going about twenty miles we lost the land and trees: the channel of the river, which lay through reeds, and was from one to three feet deep, ran northerly. This continued for three or four miles further, when although there had been no previous change in the breadth, depth, and rapidity of the stream for several miles, and I was sanguine in my expectations of soon entering the long sought for Australian sea, it all at once eluded our further search by spreading on every point from northwest to northeast, amongst the ocean of reeds that surrounded us still running with the same rapidity as before. There was no channel whatever amongst these reeds, and the depth varied from five to three feet. This astonis.h.i.+ng change (for I cannot call it a termination of the river), of course, left me no alternative but to endeavour to return to some spot on which we could effect a landing before dark. I estimated that on this day we had gone about twenty-four miles, on nearly the same point of bearing as yesterday. To a.s.sert positively that we were on the margin of the lake or sea into which this great body of water is discharged might reasonably be deemed a conclusion which has nothing but conjecture for its basis; but if an opinion may be permitted to be hazarded from actual appearances, mine is decidedly in favour of our being in the vicinity of an inland sea or lake, most probably a shoal one, and gradually filling up by immense depositions from the higher lands, left by the waters which flow into it. It is most singular that the high lands on this continent seem to be confined to the sea coast or not to extend to any distance from it."

Satisfied that to the westward nothing more could be done in the way of exploration, Oxley returned to Mount Harris, where a temporary depot was formed. Mr. Evans immediately started on a trip to the north-east; he was absent ten days, during which time he discovered the Castlereagh River.

The weather had set in wet and stormy, the rivers kept rising and falling, and the level country was soft and boggy, excessively tiring to their jaded horses; moreover, in consequence of the boats being now left behind, the packs were greatly increased in weight.

On the 20th July, the whole of the party bade adieu to the Macquarie, which they had once trusted to so fondly, and commenced their journey to the eastern coast, making in the first place for Arbuthnot's Range.

Before leaving, a bottle was buried on Mount Harris, containing a written scheme of their proposed route and intentions, with some silver coin.

On July 27th, they reached the bank of the Castlereagh, after a hard struggle through the bogs and swamps. The river was flooded, and must have risen almost directly after Mr. Evans crossed it on his homeward route. It was not until the 2nd of August that the waters fell sufficiently to allow them to cross. Still steering for the range, their course lay across shaking quagmires, or wading through miles of water; constantly having to unload and reload the unfortunate horses, who could scarcely get through the bog without their packs. Before reaching the range, the party camped at the small hill, previously ascended by Mr.

Evans. Here they found the compa.s.s strangely affected: on placing it on a rock the card flew round with extreme velocity, and then suddenly settled at opposite points, the north point becoming the south. A short distance from the base of the hill the needle regained its proper position. This hill received the name of Loadstone Hill.

Crossing Arbuthnot Range round the northern base of Mount Exmouth, the explorers, although still terribly hara.s.sed by the boggy state of the country, found themselves in splendid pastoral land. Hills, dales, and plains of the richest description lay before them, and from the elevations the view presented was of the most varied kind; this tract of country was called by Oxley Liverpool Plains. On Mount Tetley, and many of the hills about, the same variations of the compa.s.s were observed as had formerly been noticed on Loadstone Hill. Through this beautiful district the party now had a less arduous journey than before, and their horses were able to regain some of their lost strength.

On the 2nd of September, they crossed a river which they named the Peel River, and here one of their number narrowly escaped drowning. Still pus.h.i.+ng eastward, and continuing to travel through beautiful grazing country Oxley was suddenly stopped by a deep glen running across his track:--

"This tremendous ravine runs near north and south, its breadth at the bottom does not apparently exceed one hundred or two hundred feet, whilst the separation of the outer edges is from two to three miles. I am certain that in perpendicular depth it exceeds three thousand feet. The slopes from the edges were so steep and covered with loose stones that any attempt to descend even on foot was impracticable. From either side of this abyss, smaller ravines of similar character diverged, the distance between which seldom exceeded half-a-mile. Down them trickled small rills of water, derived from the range on which we were. We could not, however, discern which way the water in the main valley ran, as the bottom was concealed by a thicket of vines and creeping plants."

This barrier turned them to the south, and afterwards to the west again; on the way, they met with a grand fall one hundred and fifty feet in height, which they named Becket's Cataract. At the head of the glen they found another fall which they estimated at two hundred and thirty feet in height; crossing above this cataract, which was called Bathurst's Fall, the eastern course was once more resumed, and tempests and storms found them wandering amongst the deep ravines and gloomy forests of the coast range, seeking for a descent to the lower lands.

On the 23rd of September, Oxley, accompanied by Evans, ascended a mountain to try and discover a practicable route, and from there caught sight of the sea.

"Bilboa's ecstasy at the first sight of the South Sea could not have been greater than ours when, on gaining the summit of this mountain, we beheld Old Ocean at our feet: it inspired us with new life: every difficulty vanished, and in imagination we were already home."

Now commenced the final descent, and a perilous one it was:--