. Since that time it has, in a great measure, retrieved its
character; it is now doing what it can to attract free immigrants, and
offers large tracts of pastoral land at low rentals, while the farming
classes are attracted by free selection at only ten shillings an acre,
with ten years in which to pay it. It has joined Perth to Albany by a
good railway, and several branch railways have been constructed, as well
as a large number of telegraph lines; and at Albany, the town on King
George's Sound, it has established a coaling depot for the mail steamers
on their way to Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. But West Australia is
still what it was called twenty years ago, "the giant skeleton of a
colony," consisting of about forty thousand people, scattered over a
hundred thousand square miles of territory, behind which stretches a
vast region of unexplored wilderness. There is every indication,
however, that its progress in the near future will be rapid. Up to 1870
it formed what was called a Crown colony: the people had no voice in
their own government; their affairs were managed for them by the
officers of the English Government. At that date, however, when
transportation was abolished, the colony was promoted to the partial
management of its own affairs, and the people began periodically to
elect a Legislative Council. In 1890 it was still further promoted,
being raised to the full dignity of an independent colony, having, like
the other colonies of Australia, a Parliament of two Houses, with power
to make and unmake its own laws as it pleases. Perth is now rapidly
increasing, and the colony is on the eve of its palmy days.

CHAPTER XVI.

QUEENSLAND, 1823-1890.

#1. Moreton Bay.#--When Captain Cook, in 1770, sailed into the wide
opening of Moreton Bay, several of his friends on board observed the sea
to be paler than usual, and formed the opinion that, if a careful search
were made along the shores, it would be found that a large river fell
into the sea somewhere in the neighbourhood. Cook attached so little
weight to this idea that he did not stay to make any examination; and
when, about twenty years later, Captain Flinders surveyed the same bay,
he saw no trace of a river, though he made special search for one.

But the reports of both these travellers were subsequently found to be
erroneous; for, in 1823, when Governor Brisbane sent the discoverer
Oxley, in the _Mermaid_, to select a place for a new convict st