Page:The Australian explorers.djvu/54

 king's botanist, Charles Frazer, as colonial botanist, William Parr, as mineralogist, and eight others. On the 20th of April, 1817, all the members of the expedition met at a store depôt on the bank of the Lachlan River, which had been fixed as the point of departure. The details of their weary wanderings have been recorded only at too great length in Oxley's published journals. The author in the commencement of his work apologized for the uneventful character of the narrative, and if this was necessary when enthusiasm for exploration was at fever heat, the reader of the present day is not likely to consider it superfluous. The fault, however, did not lie with the writer, but is to be attributed to the uninteresting materials which form the staple of his bulky volumes. The country he had to traverse soon turned out to be singularly tame and tedious. The sea coast, with its never-ending scenes of beauty, had been left far behind; the mountain ranges, with their vast and varied grandeur, had sunk below the horizon, and in place of both were found only the dull and dreary plains of the Australian bush. Were it not that the whole of the country was new, this record of daily travel would read like the diary of a conscientious but uneventful life. It will be desirable, therefore, to touch only on the chief points of the narrative.

Starting from the point previously indicated, the party proceeded on their travels along the southern bank of the river. Wild fowl appeared in large