Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/21

THE

CHAPTER I.

AUSTRALIA FROM 1520 TO 1770.

USTRALIA—New South Wales—Botany Bay. These are the names under which, within the memory of men of middle age, a great island-continent at the antipodes has been explored, settled, and advanced from the condition of a mere gaol, or sink, on which our surplus felonry was poured—a sheep-walk tended by nomadic burglars—to be the wealthiest offset of the British crown—a land of promise for the adventurous—a home of peace and independence for the industrious—an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and and the easiest best-paid employments are to be found; where every striving man who rears a race of industrious children may sit under the shadow of his own vine and his own fig-tree—not without work, but with little care—living on his own land, looking down the valleys to his herds, and towards the hills to his flocks, amid the humming of bees which know no winter.

Under the genial variations of the climate of Australia all the productions of southern and temperate latitudes flourish—the palm and the oak, the potato and the yam, the orange and the apple, wheat and Indian corn. Over her boundless pastures millions of sheep wander—sheep of "noble race," whose feet, according to the Spanish proverb, "turn all the earth they touch to gold;" cattle by tens of thousands, that may compare with the best of Durham, or Hereford, or Devon; and horses as swift and untiring as ever bounded over the stony deserts of Arabia. In her mountain ridges and river beds gold is gathered in greater profusion than Cortes or Pizarro—dreamed gathered without shedding one drop of blood. Peaceful seas surround—safe harbours give access to—this goodly land, which may be traversed inland for hundreds of miles on foot or horseback. No ravenous