the defects which he saw in the current life of the colony,
and naturally he was led into propounding some way in which these
defects could be overcome. Contemporary reviewers, then, were not
so far wrong when theycommented that the book looked almost like
two books written by separate hands.

The secondary theme became the most important part of the
book, because the remedies he then proposed for his country's
ills became the guidelines for his own policies when he returned
to Australia. Through the influences which he and his friends
exerted over the next thirty years, these policies determined
much of the course of Australian history in those times. Most of
his proposals were eventually accepted, though in some cases much
later than he wanted, and in some cases with modifications which
he himself made or which were forced on him by the pressure of
events.

At the time he wrote this book he was in his middle twenties,
having returned to England to complete his education soon after
participating in the first crossing of the Blue Mountains.
Waterloo had just been won; Europe was settling down and trying
to forget Napoleon. The wounds of the American Revolution were
closing; British merchants and industrialists were preparing to
change the face of the world in accordance with the precepts of
Adam Smith.

In his attempt to divert the migration stream he was no enemy
of America, (indeed he had chosen the name "Vermont" for his own
farm on the Nepean) but he was perhaps the first Australian
really to support Macquarie's drive for Australian expansion and
Australian independence from London administration. He did this
at a time when some influential Englishmen were urging the
abandonment of the whole Botany Bay venture, which, after thirty
years, was still not self-supporting and which seemed doomed to
suffer from recurrent crises.

Apparently Macquarie had dreamed of a great transcontinental
river, which was to flow 2,000 miles westwards from the Dividing
Range, through fertile and well-watered fields, until it reached
the sea somewhere on the north-west coast. The Lachlan had been
found to peter out into swamps, but Oxley believed that the
Macquarie River would have a happier issue, and at the time of
the first Edition of this book (1819) that theory was still
tenable. It was not long, of course, before these hopes were to
perish in the Macquarie Marshes, to be succeeded by prospects of
a mythical Inland Sea, thou