- EXPLORING -AUSTRALIA
Early Explorers in Australia. By Ida Lee (Mrs. C. B. Marriott). (Methuen. 21s. net.) THE discovery and early exploration of Australia has a unique place in the history both of our country and of exploration in general. For one thing, it was the last discovery on the grand scale of land fit for the white man to dwell in, and the pioneers were, to some extent at least, consciously serving the interests of what they already called Empire. " To us it was a great and important day," wrote Captain Tench on reaching New South Wales in H.M.S. Sirius on January 20th, 1788, " and I hope will mark the foundation . . . of an Empire." Moreover England had lost her first great overseas settlement, the American colonies, in 1776. And thus although it was now generally expected that the inevitable destiny of any colony must be sooner or later to drop away from the mother country like an overripe pear, there was a certain sense of repairing loss about the pioneering work of the early settlers in Australia.
Science rather than any desire of acquisition carried Cook and the ' Endeavour ' to Australia in 1770. " Under the auspices of British Science these shores were discovered," says the tablet set up at Kurnell in 1822 by the Philosophical Society of Australia. And the spot was made " for ever England " by the first burial of an Englishman in Australian soil, by the discoverers themselves—a seaman named Forby
Sutherland:
"for the sound Of Christian burial better did proclaim
Possession than the flag of England's name."
What may be called the second stage of Australian dis- covery, however, was due not to science but to the exigencies of the early settlers of Sydney, who were completely hemmed
in by that part of the Great Dividing Range which curves above Broken Bay on the north and below Port Jackson to the South. For twenty-five years the colonists tried in vain to pass the barrier. " Over the hills and far away," they knew, must lie a land of promise—but they could not reach it.
"Many set out never to return ; often a settler in search of grass or a pioneer "starting without proper -equipMent vanished for ever in the wilderness of forest ; but his disappearance caused little- surprise and the country to the westward remained unseen and unknown."
The early attempts, from Captain Phillip's in 1788 to the final success of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in 1813, make a fine record of courage, persistence and ingenuity. Mrs. Marriott has set it down from the journals of the adven- turers themselves. Her narrative is almost as destitute of artifice as the simple records upon which she draws, but it contains material for a score of adventure tales. In 1801 Caley had sighted the promised land but, like Richard before Jerusalem, he had to turn back from it defeated :--
" He then turned and looked westward ! Before him lay that hidden region whose secrets so many brave explorers had vainly striven to discover ; whose fertile plains and wide rivers still awaiting the coming of white men were to prove the goal of those who followed hun on his path of exploration . . . "
The rest of Mrs. Marriott's book, three quarters of the whole, consists almost entirely of the diarY of Allan Cunning- ham. Here we return to a servant of science. Cunningham was a " Botanical Collector " for the Royal Gardens at Kew, who began his work as a member of the expedition which Oxley led in 1817 to trace the course of the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers. Without neglecting (as the diary abund- antly proves) his duties as King's Botanist, Cunningham filled his pages also with the new knowledge of rivers, pastures and mountain passes which his companions were gleaning.
Mrs. Marriott has done good work in printing this journal for the first time in extenso. There is scarcely more conscious art here than in the log-books of the seamen or the diaries of the pioneers of the -Blue Mountains, but the journal is a storehouse of interesting observation. The botanist in par- • titular will find endless material for the _study of what can only be called pioneer's botany. Cunningham naturally uses the Latin names of his plants and even a sprinkling of the hideous Anglo-Latin technical terms against which of •
late a few flower-lovers, such as Mr. Salt, have protested. Fortunately, however, for the unbotanical reader these are not so exaggerated by Cunningham as they are by some of our contemporaries. We may not care for the sound of " pentandrous solitary axillary flowers," but probably the least erudite of us can guess what the words mean, and we can scarcely grudge this much technology to the private journal of a professional botanist.
Cunningham was one of those disinterested scientists by whom what we call civilization is created. He was already looking forward to his return to England when he died, worn out, in 1839. He is buried at Sydney. His journal is in the Natural History Museum at Kensington. Too often, though their work remains, such men are forgotten. Mrs. Marriott's volume should be welcome not less as a tribute to Cunningham than as a contribution to the early history of the Australian Commonwealth.
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