To Mrs. Cashel Hoey, the well-known authoress and Australian correspondent, who revised and cleared my original manuscripts, I have to accord my most sincere thanks.  To Mr. Henniker-Heaton, M.P., who appears to be the Imperial Member in the British Parliament for all Australia, I am under great obligations, he having introduced me to Mr. Marston, of the publishing firm who have produced these volumes.  I also have to thank Messrs. Clowes and Sons for the masterly way in which they have printed this work.  Also Messrs. Creed, Robinson, Fricker, and Symons, of the publishing staff.  The maps have been reproduced by Weller, the well-known geographer.

(Illustration:  Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London.  “Victoria D.G.  Britanniarum Regina, 1837, Patrona.  Or, Terras Reclusas, Ernest Giles, 1880.”)

INTRODUCTION.

Before narrating my own labours in opening out portions of the unknown interior of Australia, it will be well that I should give a succinct account of what others engaged in the same arduous enterprise around the shores and on the face of the great Southern Continent, have accomplished.

After the wondrous discoveries of Columbus had set the Old World into a state of excitement, the finding of new lands appears to have become the romance of that day, as the exploration by land of unknown regions has been that of our time; and in less than fifty years after the discovery of America navigators were searching every sea in hopes of emulating the deeds of that great explorer; but nearly a hundred years elapsed before it became known in Europe that a vast and misty land existed in the south, whose northern and western shores had been met in certain latitudes and longitudes, but whose general outline had not been traced, nor was it even then visited with anything like a systematic geographical object.  The fact of the existence of such a land at the European antipodes no doubt set many ardent and adventurous spirits upon the search, but of their exploits and labours we know nothing.

The Dutch were the most eager in their attempts, although Torres, a Spaniard, was, so far as we know, the first to pass in a voyage from the West Coast of America to India, between the Indian or Malay Islands, and the great continent to the south, hence we have Torres Straits.  The first authentic voyager, however, to our actual shores was Theodoric Hertoge, subsequently known as Dirk Hartog—­bound from Holland to India.  He arrived at the western coast between the years 1610 and 1616.  An island on the west coast bears his name:  there he left a tin plate nailed to a tree with the date of his visit and the name of his ship, the Endragt, marked upon it.  Not very long after Theodoric Hertoge, and still to the western and north-western coasts, came Zeachern, Edels, Nuitz, De Witt, and Pelsart, who was wrecked upon Houtman’s Albrolhos, or rocks named by Edels,