“The mountains I observed bearing north-west are covered with snow; I thought on my way out that their tops looked rather white.  To-day it was distinguished as plain as ever I saw snow on the mountains in Van Diemen’s Land.  I never felt colder weather than it has been some days past.  We have broken ice full two inches thick.”

On the 12th of June the party returned to Bathurst, and Evans had by that time accomplished two of the most momentous journeys ever made in Australia.  It was not his actual discoveries alone that brought him fame, but the vast field for settlement these discoveries opened up.  The independent explorations of Surveyor Evans ceased after his discovery of the Lachlan; thenceforward he served Australia as second to Lieutenant Oxley.

2.3.  The unknown west.

The settlers of that day took every advantage of the new outlets for their energies, thrown open to them by the recent successful explorations.  Cattle and sheep were rapidly driven forward on to the highlands, and, favoured by a beautiful site, the town of Bathurst soon assumed an orderly appearance.  Private enterprise had also been at work elsewhere.  The pioneer settlers were making their way south; the tide of settlement flowed over the intermediate lands to the Shoalhaven River; and in the north they had commenced the irresistible march of civilization up the Hunter River.

It was in the Shoalhaven district that young Hamilton Hume, the first Australian-born explorer to make his mark in the field, gained his bushcraft.

Governor Macquarie, during his term of office, did his best to foster exploration; and it was fortunate that the first advance into the interior occurred when there was a Governor in Australia who did not look coldly upon geographical enterprise.

The men who entered first upon the task of solving the geographical problems of the interior of the Australian continent were doomed to meet with much bitter disappointment.  The varying nature of the seasons caused the different travellers to form contrary and perplexing ideas, often with regard to the same tract of country.  What appeared to one man a land of pleasant gurgling brooks, flowing through rich pastures, appeared to another as a pitiless desert, unfit for human foot to venture upon.  Oxley, who traversed what is now the cream of the agricultural portion of the state of New South Wales, speaks of the main part of it in terms of the bitterest condemnation.  His error was of course rather a mistake in judgment than the result of inaccurate observation.

Some of the colonists nursed far fonder hopes, and the general opinion seemed to be that these western flowing rivers would gather in tributaries, and having swollen to a size worthy of so great a continent, seek the sea on the west coast.  W.C.  Wentworth, who certainly was capable of forming an opinion deserving consideration, wrote thus of the then untraced Macquarie River:—­