Page:Northmost Australia volume 1.djvu/22



HE Cape York Peninsula, forming, as it does, the link binding the two great islands of Australia and New Guinea, is necessarily of the highest importance from a geological, ethnological, zoological, botanical, historical, political and strategical point of view.

It so happens that the Peninsula is the first part of Australia to which authentic written history refers. On the earliest landing of Europeans there arose the complex questions which obtrude themselves whenever civilisation comes into contact with barbarism.

My practical interest in the Peninsula began with a tour made in 1879 in the course of my Geological Survey work. On my way to the recently rushed and still more recently abandoned "Coen" gold diggings, I crossed the base of the then almost unknown Cape Melville Peninsula, where I found indications of auriferous country, and also the rivers south of Princess Charlotte Bay, down which the unfortunate explorer Kennedy had struggled in vain to keep his appointment with the relief ship twenty-two years earlier. From the Coen, I was only able to push out to the north for a period inexorably limited by the condition of my horses and the quantity of food remaining in my saddle-bags. Even under these conditions, however, I penetrated for some distance into the Mcllwraith Range, and on the heads of the river which I named the Peach (unaware that it was the river named the Archer by the Brothers jardine, who crossed it near its mouth) I found widespread evidence of the presence of gold and tin.

From the Laura Telegraph Office, from Cooktown, and ultimately from my headquarters at Townsville, I made such communications as were possible in anticipation of a complete report to the head of the Department of Mines, which administered the Geological Survey.

My individual impression was that the reefs in the district traversed were of more importance than the alluvial gold, but there had been neither means nor time at my disposal to enable me to satisfy myself of the value of either, and this view I duly represented in my correspondence with the Department.