gh it was decades before the
enthusiasts realised that they would have to be satisfied with
Lake Eyre.

This first edition accepts as fact the phantom of that
transcontinental stream and expatiates on the blessings which it
would bring, patterning its concept of the Heart of the
Australian Continent upon what was known of the Great Plains of
America, then just being opened up. Any child with an Atlas in
hand can now decry the mistake of having given to this concept
more credence than did Oxley or Macquarie: does not hindsight
make history so simple?

Abandonment of simple optimism on this physical fact must have
been quick and uncomfortable: but abandonment of some other
precepts must have been slow and more painful. At the time of
this first edition, the influence of the Enlightenment was
completing its penetration into politics and economics. Man had
only to be given freedom, and he would enter into a political
Paradise: the forces of the free market had only to be left
untrammelled, and they would create of themselves an economic
Eden!

These are the enthusiasms of the first edition, where Bligh
represents the forces of repression and darkness, while Macquarie
and Macarthur are both to be numbered among the angels. By the
time of the third edition (1824, nearly contemporary with the
author's return to Australia) the winds of change had blown
through the Australian scene. Bigge had presented his Report,
which destroyed so much of Macquarie's work, and the Exclusives,
in the author's view, were leagued with enemies of Australian
identity.

For the next thirty years the politics of New South Wales were
vigorous and variegated. Nobody who was at their centre could
have maintained all his illusions as to the essential goodness of
human nature, if only it could be freed from the unnatural chains
with which society had bound it. Nor could anyone who
participated in the commercial life of those times, who had
lived, for example, through the depression of the forties, have
preserved untarnished the precepts of Ricardo--published only a
few years before 1819, and accepted as gospel in that first
edition.

So some of those 1819 enthusiasms had to be abandoned: but the
objectives were not. Most of them were eventually to be
translated into action and actuality. It was in their
modification, perhaps, that the author was to display most of all
his foresight and acumen. From 1848 onwards he recognised the
true nature of