Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/129

 of respect to his Excellency the Governor, under whose orders the bay was examined, was now honoured with the name of Brisbane river. The whole of the next day was spent in sounding the entrance and traversing the country in the vicinity of Redcliff point, and we did not reach the vessel until late in the night of the 5th of December, amply gratified in the discovery of this important river, as we sanguinely anticipated the most beneficial consequences as likely to result to the colony by the formation of a settlement on its banks."

Subsequent expeditions of discovery have not verified the conjectures which Mr. Oxley, in the preceding account of the Brisbane, advanced as to its probable source, and the length of its course. The much larger quantity of water which flows down the rivers in the north-east part of the territory of New South Wales, compared with rivers of equal length of course in the southern and western parts of the colony, might easily have led Mr. Oxley to believe at the time of his discovery of the Brisbane, that that river was the largest fresh-water river in the colony, and had a very long course; whereas it is much inferior in size to the Clarence, and not even equal to the MacLeay river.

The Brisbane river rises in the chain of mountains dividing the eastern and western waters; this range is only sixty miles distant in a straight line from the coast, opposite Moreton Bay; but from the width of the basin of the Brisbane river, its tortuous