The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work Part 22

We have now turned the last page of the story of those bold spirits who played no mean part in the making of Australasia by exploring the continent. For nearly a century and a quarter the white man had been restlessly searching out and traversing every square mile of the land, and now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, his work is finished.

And throughout the long struggle it had ever been a stubborn conflict between the explorer and the inert forces of Nature. Through the weary toilsome years of arduous discovery, Man and Nature had seldom marched side by side as friends and allies. When Nature posed as the explorer's friend and guide, it was often only to lure him on with a smiling face to his doom. From the days when the soldier of King George the Third went forth with his firelock on his shoulder, computing the distance he covered by wearily counting the number of paces he trudged, to the day when the modern adventurer aloft on his camel eagerly scans the horizon of the red desert in search of the distant smoke of a native fire, and then patiently tracks the naked denizen of the wilderness to his h.o.a.rded rock-hole or scanty spring, the explorer has ever had to fight the battle of discovery unaided by Nature. The aborigines generally either feigned ignorance of the nature of the country, or gave only false clues and misguiding directions. Even the birds and animals of the untrodden regions seemed to resent the advance of civilization, and to delight in leading the footsteps of the white intruder astray. Hence it was by slow degrees, by careful study of the work of his predecessors in the field, and often by heeding the warning conveyed in their unhappy fate, that the Australian explorer added to the sum of knowledge of his country, and step by step unveiled the hidden mysteries of the continent.