The investigations of Mr R. II. Major make it appear probable that the Australian mainland was known as “Great Java” to the Portuguese early in the 16th century; and the following passage in the Descriptionis Ptolemaicoe Augmentum of Cornelius Wytfliet, printed at Louvain in 1598. is perhaps the first distinct account that occurs of the country :—“The Australis Terra is the most southern of all lands, and is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait. Its shores are hitherto but little known, since, after one voyage and another, that route has been deserted, and seldom is the country visited, unless when sailors are driven there by storms. The Aτιstralis Terra begins at one or two degrees from the equator, and is ascertained by some to be of so great an extent, that if it were thoroughly explored it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world.”

It was in 1606 that Torres, with a ship commissioned by the Spanish Government of Peru, parted from his companion Quiros (after their discovery of Espiritu Santo and the New Hebrides), and sailed from east to w est through the strait which bears his name; while in the same year the peninsula of Cape York w as touched at by a vessel called the “Duyfhen” or “Dove” from the Dutch colony of Bantam in Java, but this was understood at the time to form a part of the neighbouring island of New Guinea. The Dutch continued their attempts to explore the unknown land, sending out in 1616 the ship “Endraght,” commanded by Dirk Hartog, which sailed along the west coast of Australia from lat. 26° 30' to 23° S. This expedition left on an islet near Shark’s Bay a record of its visit engraved on a tin plate, which was found there in 1801. The “Pera” and “Arnhem,” Dutch vessels from Amboyna, in 1618 explored the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving to its westward peninsula, on the side opposite to Cape York, the name of Arnhem Land. The name of Carpentaria was also bestowed on this vast gulf in compliment to Peter Carpenter, then governor of the Dutch East India Company. In 1627 the “Güldene Zeepard,” carrying Peter Nuyts to the embassy in Japan, sailed along the south coast from Cape Leeuwin, and sighted the whole shore of the Great Bight. But alike on the northern and southern seaboard, the aspect of New Holland, as it was then called, presented an uninviting appearance.

An important era of discovery began with Tasman’s voyage of 1642. He, too, sailed from Batavia; but, first crossing the Indian Ocean to the Mauritius, he descended to the 44th parallel of S. lat., recrossing that ocean to the east. By taking this latter course he reached the island which now bears his name, but which he called Van Diemen’s Land, after the Dutch governor of Batavia. In 1644 Tasman made another attempt, w hen he explored the north-west coast of Australia, from Arnhem Land to the 22d degree of latitude, approaching the locality of Dirk Hartog’s discoveries of 1616. He seems to have landed at Cape Ford, near Victoria River, also in Roebuck Bay, and again near Dampier’s Archipelago. But the hostile attitude of the natives, whom he denounced as a malicious and miserable race of savages, prevented his seeing much of the new country; and for half a century after this no fresh discoveries were made.

The English made their first appearance on the Australian coast in 1688, w hen the north-western shores were visited by the famous buccaneer Captain William Dampier, who spent five weeks ashore near Roebuck Bay. A few years later (1697) the Dutch organised another expedition under Vlamingh, who, first touching at Swan River on the west coast, sailed northward to Shark’s Bay, where Hartog had been in 1616. Dampier, two years later, visited the same place, not now as a roving adventurer, but with a commission from the English Admiralty to pursue his Australian researches. This enterprising navigator, in the narrative of his voyages, gives an account of the trees, birds, and reptiles he observed, and of his encounters with the natives. But he found nothing to invite a long stay. There was yet another Dutch exploring squadron on that coast in 1705, but the results were of little importance.

It was Captain Cook, in his voyages from 1769 to 1777, who communicated the most important discoveries, and first opened to European enterprise and settlement the Australasian coasts. In command of the bark “Endeavour,” 370 tons burden, and carrying 85 persons, amongst whom were Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Solander, returning from the Royal Society’s expedition to observe the transit of Venus, Cook visited both New Zealand and New South Wales. He came upon the Australian mainland in April 1770, at a point named after Lieutenant Hicks, who first sighted it, on the shore of Gipps’ Land, Victoria, S. lat. 38°, E. long. 148° 53'. From this point, in a coasting voyage not without peril when entangled in the barrier reefs of coral, the little vessel made its way up the whole length of the eastern side of Australia, rounding Cape York, and crossing Torres Strait to New Guinea. In his second expedition of Australasian discovery, which was sent out in 1773, Cook’s ship, the “Resolute,” started in company with the “Adventure,” commanded by Captain Fur- .neaux. The two vessels separated, and Cook went to New Zealand, while Furneaux examined some parts of Tasmania and Bass Strait. The third voyage of Cook brought him, in 1777, both to Tasmania and to New Zealand.

Next to Cook, twenty or thirty years after his time, the names of Bass and Flinders are justly honoured for continuing the work of maritime discovery he had so well begun. To their courageous and persevering efforts, begun at their private risk, is due the correct determination of the shape both of Tasmania and the neighbouring continent. The French admiral Entrecasteaux, in 1792, had made a careful examination of the inlets at the south of Tasmania, and in his opinion the opening between Tasmania and Australia was only a deep bay. It was Bass who discovered it to be a broad strait, with numerous small islands. Captain Flinders survived his friend Bass, having been associated with him in 1798 in this and other useful adventures. Flinders afterwards made a complete 8urvey in detail of all the Australian coasts, except the west and north-west. He was captured, however, by the French during the war, and detained a prisoner in Mauritius for seven years.

The shores of what is now the province of Victoria were explored in 1800 by Captain Grant, and in 1802 by Lieutenant Murray, when the spacious land-locked bay of Port Phillip was discovered. New South Wales had already been colonised, and the town of Sydney founded at Port Jackson in 1788. West Australia had long remained neglected, but in 1837, after the settlement at Swan River, a series of coast surveys was commenced in H.M.S. “Beagle.” These were continued from 1839 to 1843 by Mr Stokes, and furnished an ’exact knowledge of the western, north-western, and northern shores, including four large rivers.

Inland Exploration.— The geographical position of the Australian continent had now been sufficiently determined, and what Remained for discovery was sought, not as hitherto by coasting along its shores and bays, but by striking into the vast tract of terra incognita that occupied the interior. The colony of New South Wales had been founded in 1788, but for twenty-five years its settlers were acquainted only with a strip of country 50 miles wide, between the Blue Mountains and the sea-coast, for they scarcely ever ventured far inland from the inlets of Port Jackson and Botany Bay. Mr Bass, indeed, once while waiting for his vessel, made an attempt to cross the Blue Mountains, and succeeded in discovering the River Grove, a tributary of the Hawkesbury, but did not proceed further. An expedition was also conducted by Governor Hunter along the Nepean River west of the settlement, while Lieutenant Bareiller, in 1802, and Mr Caley, a year or two later, failed in their endeavour to surmount the Blue Mountain range. This formidable ridge attains a height of 3400 feet, and being intersected with precipitous ravines 1500 feet deep, presented a bar to these explorers’ passage inland. At last, in 1813, when a summer of severe drought had made it of vital importance to find new pastures, three of the colonists, Messrs Wentworth and Blaxland and Lieutenant Lawson, crossing the Nepean at Emu Plains, gained sight of an entrance, and ascending the summit of a dividing ridge, obtained a view of the grassy valley of the Fish River. This stream runs westward into the Macquarie, which was discovered a few months afterwards by Mr Evans, who followed its course across the fertile plains of Bathurst.

In 1816 Lieutenant Oxley, R.N., accompanied by Mr Evans and Mr Cunningham the botanist, conducted an expedition of great interest down the Lachlan River, 300 miles to the north-west, reaching a point 34° S. lat., and 144° 30' E. long. On his return journey Oxley again struck the Macquarie River at a place he called Wellington, and from this place in the following year he organised a second expedition in hopes of discovering an inland sea. He was, however, disappointed in this, as after descending the course of the Macquarie below Mount Harris, he found that the river ended in an immense swamp overgrown with reeds. Oxley now turned aside—led by Mr Evans’s report of the country eastward—crossed the Arbuthnot range, and traversing the Liverpool Plains, and ascending the Peel and Cockburn Rivers to the Blue Mountains, gained sight of the open sea, which he reached at Port Macquarie. A valuable extension of geographical knowledge had been gained by this circuitous journey of more than 800 miles. Yet its result was a disappointment to those who had looked for means of inland navigation by the Macquarie River, and by its supposed issue in a Mediterranean sea.

During the next two or three years public attention was occupied with Captain King’s maritime explorations of the north-west coast in three successive voyages, and by explorations of West Australia in 1821. These steps were followed by the foundation of a settlement on Melville Island, in the extreme north, which, however, was soon abandoned. In 1823 Lieutenant Oxley proceeded to Moreton Bay and Port Curtis, the first place 7° north of Sydney, the other 10°, to choose the site of a new penal establishment. From a shipwrecked English sailor he met with, who had lived with the savages, he heard of the river Brisbane. About the same time, in the opposite direction, south-west of Sydney, a large extent of the interior was revealed. The River Murrumbidgee—which unites with the Lachlan to join the great River Murray—was traced by Mr Hamilton Hume and Mr Hovell into the country lying north of the province of Victoria, through which they made their way to Port Phillip. In 1827 and the two following years, Mr Cunningham prosecuted his instructive explorations on both sides of the Liverpool range, between the upper waters of the Hunter and those of the Peel and other tributaries of the Brisbane north of New South Wales. Some of his discoveries, including those of Pandora’s Pass and the Darling Downs, were of great practical utility.

By this time much had thus been done to obtain an acquaintance with the eastern parts of the Australian continent, although the problem of what could become of the large rivers flowing north-west and south-west into the interior was still unsolved. With a view to determine this question, Governor Sir Ralph Darling, in the year 1828, sent out the expedition under Captain Charles Sturt, who proceeding first to the marshes at the end of the Macquarie River, found his progress checked by the dense mass of reeds in that quarter. He therefore turned westward, and struck a large river, with many affluents, to which he gave the name of the Darling. This river, flowing from north-east to south-west, drains the marshes in which the Macquarie and other streams from the south appeared to be lost. The course of the Murrumbidgee, a deep and rapid river, was followed by the same eminent explorer in his second expedition in 1831 with a more satisfactory result. He travelled on this occasion nearly 2000 miles, and discovered that both the Murrumbidgee, carrying with it the waters of the Lachlan morass, and likewise the Darling, from a more northerly region, finally joined another and larger river. This stream, the Murray, in the upper part of its course, runs in a north-westerly direction, but afterwards turning southwards, almost at a right angle, expands into Lake Alexandrina on the south coast, about 60 miles S.E. of the town of Adelaide, and finally enters the sea at Encounter Bay in E. long. 139°.

After gaining a practical solution of the problem of the destination of the westward-flowing rivers, Sir Thomas Mitchell, in 1835, led an expedition northward to the upper branches of the Darling; but the party meeting with a sad disaster in the death of Mr Cunningham, the eminent botanist, who was murdered by the natives on the Bogan River, further exploration of that region was left to be undertaken by Dr Leichardt, nine years later, and by the son of Sir Thomas MitchelL Meantime, from the new colony of Adelaide, South Australia, on the shores of Gulf St Vincent, a series of adventurous journeys to the north and to the west was commenced by Mr Eyre, who explored a country much more difficult of access, and more forbidding in aspect, than the “Riverina” of the eastern provinces. He performed in 1840 a feat of extraordinary personal daring, travelling all the way along the barren seacoast of the Great Australian Bight, from Spencer Gulf to King George’s Sound. Mr Eyre also explored the interior north of the head of Spencer Gulf, where he was misled, however, by appearances to form an erroneous theory about the water-surfaces named Lake Torrens. It was left to the veteran explorer, Sturt, to achieve the arduous enterprise of penetrating from the Darling northward to the very centre of the continent. This was in 1845, the route lying for the most part over a stony desert, where the heat (reaching 131° Fahr.), with scorching winds, caused much suffering to the party. The most northerly point reached by Sturt on this occasion was about S. lat. 24° 25'. His unfortunate successors, Burke and Wills, travelled through the same district sixteen years later; and other expeditions were organised, both from the north and from the south, which aimed at learning the fate of these travellers, as well as that of Dr Leichardt. These efforts completed our knowledge of different routes across the entire breadth of Australia, in the longitude of the Gulf of Carpentaria; while the enterprising journeys of Mac-Douall Stuart, a companion of Sturt, obtained in 1862 a direct passage from South Australia northward. to the shores of the Malayan Sea. This route has been utilised by the construction of an overland telegraph from Adelaide to the northern coast.

A military station having been fixed by the British Government at Port Victoria, on the coast of Arnhem Land, for the protection of shipwrecked mariners on the north coast, it was thought desirable to find an overland route between this settlement and Moreton Bay, in what then was the northern portion of New South Wales, now called Queensland. This was the object of Dr Leichardt’s expedition in 1844, which proceeded first along the banks of the Dawson and the Mackenzie, tributaries of the Fitzroy River, in Queensland. It thence passed farther north to the Burdekin, ascending to the source of that river, and turned westward across a table-land, from which there was an easy descent to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Skirting the low shores of this gulf, all the way round its upper half to the Roper, Leichardt crossed Arnhem Land to the Alligator River, which he descended to the western shore of the peninsula, and arrived at Port Victoria, otherwise Port Essington, after a journey of 3000 miles, performed within a year and three months. In 1847 Leichardt undertook a much more formidable task, that of crossing the entire continent from east to west. His starting point was on the Fitzroy Downs, north of the River Condamine, in Queensland, between the 26th and 27th degrees of S. latitude. But this eminent explorer had not proceeded far into the interior before he met his death, his last despatch dating from the Cogoon, April 3, 1848. In the same region, from 1845 to 1847, Sir Thomas Mitchell and Mr E. B. Kennedy explored the northern tributaries of the Darling, and a river in S. lat. 24°, named the Barcoo or Victoria, which flows to the south-west. This river was more thoroughly examined by Mr A. C. Gregory in 1858. Mr Kennedy lost his life in 1848, being killed by the natives while attempting to explore the peninsula of Cape York, from Rockingham Bay to Weymouth Bay.

Among the performances of less renown, but of much practical utility in surveying and opening new paths through the country, we may mention that of Captain Banister, showing the way across the southern part of West Australia, from Swan River to King George’s Sound, and that of Messrs Robinson and G. H. Haydon in 1844, making good the route from Port Phillip to Gipps’ Land with loaded drays, through a dense tangled scrub, which had been described by Strzelecki as his worst obstacle. Again, in West Australia there were the explorations of the Arrowsmith, the Murchison, the Gascoyne, and the Ashburton Rivers, by Captain Grey, Mr Roe, Governor Fitzgerald, Mr R. Austin, and the brothers Gregory, whose discoveries have great importance from a geographical point of view.

These local researches, and the more comprehensive attempts of Leichardt and Mitchell to solve the chief problems of Australian geography, must yield in importance to the grand achievement of Mr Stuart in 1862. The first of his tours independently performed, in 1858 and 1859, were around the South Australian lakes, namely, Lake Torrens, Lake Eyre, and Lake Gairdner. These waters had been erroneously taken for parts of one vast horseshoe or sickle-shaped lake, only some twenty miles broad, believed to encircle a large portion of the inland country, with drainage at one end by a marsh into Spencer Gulf. The mistake, shown in all the old maps of Australia, had originated in a curious optical illusion. When Mr Eyre viewed the country from Mount Deception in 1840, looking between Lake Torrens and the lake which now bears his own name, the refraction of light from the glittering crust of salt that covers a large space of stony or sandy ground produced an appearance of water. The error was discovered, after eighteen years, by the explorations of Mr Babbage and Major Warburton in 1858, while Mr Stuart, about the same time, gained a more complete knowledge of the same district.

A reward of £10,000 having been offered by the Legislature of South Australia to the first man who should...