Fortunate Indeed It Was For Eyre That Such Relief Was Afforded Him; He Was Unable To Penetrate At All Into The Interior, And He Brought Back No Information Of The Character And Nature Of The Country Inland.

I am the only traveller who has explored that part of the interior, but of this more hereafter.

About this time Strezletki and McMillan, both from New South Wales, explored the region now the easternmost part of the colony of Victoria, which Strezletki called Gipp's Land. These two explorers were rivals, and both, it seems, claimed to have been first in that field.

Next on the list of explorers comes Ludwig Leichhardt, a surgeon, a botanist, and an eager seeker after fame in the Australian field of discovery, and whose memory all must revere. He successfully conducted an expedition from Moreton Bay to the Port Essington of King - on the northern coast - by which he made known the geographical features of a great part of what is now Queensland, the capital being Brisbane at Moreton Bay. A settlement had been established at Port Essington by the Government of New South Wales, to which colony the whole territory then belonged. At this settlement, as being the only point of relief after eighteen months of travel, Leichhardt and his exhausted party arrived. The settlement was a military and penal one, but was ultimately abandoned. It is now a cattle station in the northern territory division of South Australia, and belongs to some gentlemen in Adelaide.

Of Leichhardt's sad fate in the interior of Australia no tidings have ever been heard. On this fatal journey, which occurred in 1848, he undertook the too gigantic task of crossing Australia from east to west, that is to say, from Moreton Bay to Swan River. Even at that period, however, the eastern interior was not all entirely unknown, as Mitchell's Victoria River or Barcoo, and the Cooper's and Eyre's Creeks of Sturt had already been discovered. The last-named watercourse lay nearly 1000 miles from the eastern coast, in latitude 25 degrees south, and it is reasonable to suppose that to such a point Leichhardt would naturally direct his course - indeed in what was probably his last letter, addressed to a friend, he mentions this watercourse as a desirable point to make for upon his new attempt. But where his wanderings ended, and where the catastrophe that closed his own and his companions' lives occurred, no tongue can tell. After he finally left the furthest outlying settlements at the Mount Abundance station, he, like the lost Pleiad, was seen on earth no more. How could he have died and where? ah, where indeed? I who have wandered into and returned alive from the curious regions he attempted and died to explore, have unfortunately never come across a single record or any remains or traces of those long lost but unforgotten braves. Leichhardt originally started on his last sad venture with a party of eight, including one if not two native black boys.

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