In 1866, Mr. Cowle conducted an expedition from Roebourne, near Nicol Bay, on the West Coast, for four or five hundred miles to the Fitzroy River, discovered by Wickham, at the bottom of King’s Sound.

In 1869, a report having spread in Western Australia of the massacre of some white people by the natives somewhere to the eastwards of Champion Bay, on the west coast, the rumour was supposed to relate to Leichhardt and his party; and upon the representations of Baron von Mueller to the West Australian Government, a young surveyor named John Forrest was despatched to investigate the truth of the story.  This expedition penetrated some distance to the eastwards, but could discover no traces of the lost, or indeed anything appertaining to any travellers whatever.

In 1869-70, John Forrest, accompanied by his brother Alexander, was again equipped by the West Australian Government for an exploration eastwards, with the object of endeavouring to reach the South Australian settlements by a new route inland.  Forrest, however, followed Eyre’s track of 1840-1, along the shores of the Great Australian Bight, and may be said to have made no exploration at all, as he did not on any occasion penetrate inland more than about thirty miles from the coast.  At an old encampment Forrest found the skull of one of Eyre’s horses, which had been lying there for thirty years.  This trophy he brought with him to Adelaide.

The following year, Alexander Forrest conducted an expedition to the eastwards, from the West Australian settlements; but only succeeded in pushing a few miles beyond Hunt and Lefroy’s furthest point in 1864.

What I have written above is an outline of the history of discovery and exploration in Australia when I first took the field in the year 1872; and though it may not perhaps be called, as Tennyson says, one of the fairy tales of science, still it is certainly one of the long results of time.  I have conducted five public expeditions and several private ones.  The latter will not be recorded in these volumes, not because there were no incidents of interest, but because they were conducted, in connection with other persons, for entirely pastoral objects.  Experiences of hunger, thirst, and attacks by hostile natives during those undertakings relieved them of any monotony they might otherwise display.  It is, however, to my public expeditions that I shall now confine my narrative.

The wild charm and exciting desire that induce an individual to undertake the arduous tasks that lie before an explorer, and the pleasure and delight of visiting new and totally unknown places, are only whetted by his first attempt, especially when he is constrained to admit that his first attempt had not resulted in his carrying out its objects.