ide of
settlement flowed over the intermediate lands to the Shoalhaven River;
and in the north they had commenced the irresistible march of
civilization up the Hunter River.

It was in the Shoalhaven district that young Hamilton Hume, the first
Australian-born explorer to make his mark in the field, gained his
bushcraft.

Governor Macquarie, during his term of office, did his best to foster
exploration; and it was fortunate that the first advance into the
interior occurred when there was a Governor in Australia who did not look
coldly upon geographical enterprise.

The men who entered first upon the task of solving the geographical
problems of the interior of the Australian continent were doomed to meet
with much bitter disappointment. The varying nature of the seasons caused
the different travellers to form contrary and perplexing ideas, often
with regard to the same tract of country. What appeared to one man a land
of pleasant gurgling brooks, flowing through rich pastures, appeared to
another as a pitiless desert, unfit for human foot to venture upon.
Oxley, who traversed what is now the cream of the agricultural portion of
the state of New South Wales, speaks of the main part of it in terms of
the bitterest condemnation. His error was of course rather a mistake in
judgment than the result of inaccurate observation.

Some of the colonists nursed far fonder hopes, and the general opinion
seemed to be that these western flowing rivers would gather in
tributaries, and having swollen to a size worthy of so great a continent,
seek the sea on the west coast. W.C. Wentworth, who certainly was capable
of forming an opinion deserving consideration, wrote thus of the then
untraced Macquarie River:--

"If the sanguine hopes to which the discovery of this river (the
Macquarie) has given birth should be realised, and it should be found to
empty itself into the ocean in the north-west coast, which is the only
part of this vast island that has not been accurately surveyed, in what
mighty conceptions of the future power and greatness of this colony may
we not reasonably indulge? The nearest point at which Mr. Oxley left off
to any part of the western coast is very little short of two thousand
miles. If this river therefore be already of the size of the Hawkesbury
at Windsor, which is not less than two hundred and fifty yards in
breadth, and of sufficient depth to float a seventy-four gun ship, it is
not difficult to imagine wh