Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/30

 statements, needs as much care and patience as he who would narrate the rise and progress of modern Germany. The scene is different, but the actors are the same; human beings struggling mainly for personal gain, but even then subserving some higher purpose beyond their ken; and amid the turmoil, like salt to preserve the mass from corruption, those finer spirits, "touched to fine issues," which redeem the general character, and amidst whose judgments may be found a clue to the tangled labyrinth into which investigation must often lead the historian.

There is danger lest one who has lived within a portion of the time he chronicles should himself fail to preserve a just discrimination; but, if he has not been himself immersed in party quarrels, if his desire be to probe the facts and declare the truth, his personal experiences are so far advantageous that they may restrain him from accepting ignorant or wilful mis-statements made by those who have only a party purpose to serve.

How long the aborigines of Australia had roamed over its soil when Europeans first explored the coast, it is for ethnologists to discuss—perhaps without result. That they occupied sparsely the whole area, many centuries ago, is indisputable, and that their rate of migration must have been slow is equally clear. Diverse as were their dialects, when heard by Europeans, they are of common origin; although the marked difference between the language of contiguous tribes might lead careless observers to a different conclusion. When such persons find tribes scattered on hundreds of miles of the coast using similar words, and note that at a short distance inland a distinct dialect is spoken, they omit to observe that families dispersed along the coast would still cling to it, and would have occasional intercourse with their kindred of late date, but not with tribes in the interior; while the inland inhabitants, beyond the watershed of the coast range, who in many cases reached their domains by ascending the rivers which traverse the continent from east to west, would keep up their tribal intercourse in like manner through accustomed channels.

Rumours of a Great South Land were rife long before Europeans trod upon its shores. In the "Astronomicon"