cannot compete for a moment with those sublime records of what has been dared, done, and suffered, at the call of duty, and for the sake of human interests by men who have really lived and died.  I do not say that all works of fiction are entirely without interest to the human imagination, or that writers of some of these works are not clever, for in one sense they certainly are, and that is, in only writing of horrors that never occurred, without going through the preliminary agony of a practical realisation of the dangers they so graphically describe, and from which, perhaps, they might be the very first to flee, though their heroes are made to appear nothing less than demigods.  Strange as it may appear, it seems because the tales of Australian travel and self-devotion are true, that they attract but little notice, for were the narratives of the explorers not true we might become the most renowned novelists the world has ever known.  Again, Australian geography, as explained in the works of Australian exploration, might be called an unlearned study.  Let me ask how many boys out of a hundred in Australia, or England either, have ever read Sturt or Mitchell, Eyre, Leichhardt, Grey, or Stuart.  It is possible a few may have read Cook’s voyages, because they appear more national, but who has read Flinders, King, or Stokes?  Is it because these narratives are Australian and true that they are not worthy of attention?

Having well-nigh exhausted the list of the early explorers in Australia, it is necessary now to turn to a more modern school.  I must admit that in the works of this second section, with a few exceptions, such stirring narratives as those of the older travellers cannot be found.  Nevertheless, considerable interest must still attach to them, as they in reality carry on the burning torch which will not be consumed until by its light the whole of Australia stands revealed.

The modern explorers are of a different class, and perhaps of one not so high as their predecessors.  By this remark I do not mean anything invidious, and if any of the moderns are correctly to be classed with the ancients, the Brothers Gregory must be spoken of next, as being the fittest to head a secondary list.  Augustus Gregory was in the West Australian field of discovery in 1846.  He was a great mechanical, as well as a geographical, discoverer, for to him we are indebted for our modern horses’ pack-saddles in lieu of the dreadful old English sumpter horse furniture that went by that name; he also invented a new kind of compass known as Gregory’s Patent, unequalled for steering on horseback, and through dense scrubs where an ordinary compass would be almost useless, while steering on camels in dense scrubs, on a given bearing, without a Gregory would be next to impossible; it would be far easier indeed, if not absolutely necessary, to walk and lead them, which has to be done in almost all camel countries.