ver, as the country for the most part had been, through which I
passed, my voyage down that river had been the forerunner of events I
could neither have anticipated or foreseen. I returned indeed to Sydney,
disheartened and dissatisfied at the result of my investigations. To all
who were employed in that laborious undertaking, it had proved one of the
severest trial and of the greatest privation; to myself individually it
had been one of ceaseless anxiety. We had not, as it seemed, made any
discovery to gild our enterprise, had found no approximate country likely
to be of present or remote advantage to the Government by which we had
been sent forth; the noble river on whose buoyant waters we were hurried
along, seemed to have been misplaced, through such an extent of desert
did it pass, as if it was destined thus never to be of service to
civilized man, and for a short time the honour of a successful
undertaking, as far as human exertion could ensure it, was all that
remained to us after its fatigues and its dangers had terminated, as the
reader will conclude from the tenour of the above passage; for, although
at the termination of the Murray, we came upon a country, the aspect of
which indicated more than usual richness and fertility, we were unable,
from exhausted strength, to examine it as we could have wished, and thus
the fruits of our labours appeared to have been taken from us, just as we
were about to gather them. But if, amidst difficulties and
disappointments of no common description, I was led to doubt the wisdom
of Providence, I was wrong. The course of events has abundantly shewn how
presumptuous it is in man to question the arrangements of that Allwise
Power whose operations and purposes are equally hidden from us, for in
six short years from the time when I crossed the Lake Victoria, and
landed on its shores, that country formed another link in the chain of
settlements round the Australian continent, and in its occupation was
found to realize the most sanguine expectations I had formed of it. Its
rich and lovely valleys, which in a state of nature were seldom trodden
by the foot of the savage, became the happy retreats of an industrious
peasantry; its plains were studded over with cottages and corn-fields;
the very river which had appeared to me to have been so misplaced, was
made the high road to connect the eastern and southern shores of a mighty
continent; the superfluous stock of an old colony was poured