Page:The State and Position of Western Australia.djvu/25

 the model room of the Surveyor General of the Navy, at Somerset House.

The blue gum tree (which, in the south-east parts of the colony, grows to a gigantic height, and to which it will be necessary again to advert) has been estimated by an eminent ship-builder in England, to be equal, if not superior, to teak, for ship-building.

The opinion of the colonists themselves respecting the quality of the soil, as expressed in one of their addresses to the Governor on his return to Swan River in August last, is thus reported in the Colonial Gazette: “The experience of the interval between your departure and return has been of the greatest utility in establishing from facts (without the necessity of resorting any further to theories), the fertility of a large portion of the soil of this colony, when under proper cultivation; and the peculiar adaptation of the great mass of land beyond the Darling Range, in soil, herbage, and climate, to the pasturage and rearing of sheep.”

The following extract from the report of an overland expedition from Swan River to King George’s Sound (a distance of from two hundred to three hundred miles) is here given, in order to show the little probability of good land becoming scarce in the settlement for many years to come. It is written by the conductor of the expedition, Captain Bannister, an intelligent settler, who had travelled in Greece, and other European countries resembling Western Australia in climate.

He thus writes—“From the 23rd” of December “to the 5th of January, we pursued a south-by-east course, for eighty or ninety miles of actual distance, through, in many tracts, a country which surpassed our most sanguine expectations. A very great proportion of this tract was land of the finest description, fit for the plough, sheep, or cattle. The beauty of the scenery, near to and distant from the rivers which we