Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/20

 and the confidence that arises from some little experience of the way. So far these preliminaries may serve to show how imaginary are many difficulties, even those of a long standing, and how often the "will makes the way." Who, for instance, that read in times gone by of Commodore Anson's disastrous experience in rounding Cape Horn, would ever have anticipated a time like our own when "the Horn," with its awful region of eternal storm would be as familiar to every ordinary merchantman as the seas of Europe? And now it seems quite likely that in a few more years the once mysterious interior of Australia will be but a great public highway for the commerce and enterprise of the colonists.

We propose here to glance at the results of these later exploring expeditions. They throw much new light on the character of Inner Australia. Having, in this attempt, sketched out briefly the route and main incidents of each expedition across the country, we shall sum up the varied information given by the explorers, and thus endeavour to arrive at a conclusion as to what that vast interior, hitherto so little known, really consists of, and what to our practical colony-making people it is really worth. The question involves no less than a million of square miles of the earth's surface, and if we add to the account the northern coasts, which although not so