INDEX

• Introduction
• Maps
• Significant Places in Australia's Maritime History
• Naming Australia
• Naming Australia's Coastal Features

WHO DID DISCOVER AUSTRALIA?

• The Phoenecians & Egyptians
• The Greeks & Romans
• The Chinese
• The Muslims
• The Portuguese
• The Dutch
• The British
• The French

COLONIAL EXPLORATION

• Index
• The French
• The British
• Other
• Inland explorers

Colonial Exploration: 1844 - Ernest Giles

There is series of explorations which demands a little

more attention, and which has a character of its own. After the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line, it was quickly perceived that the stations along its course, being planted at the best-watered and most fertile places, would form excellent starting-points from which the unexplored immensity westward might be traversed. Of the explorers, in this region, Ernest Giles must be regarded as one of the foremost. Between 1872 and 1876 he conducted five expeditions. 'Starting in the first instance from Chambers' Pillar, he broke into the desert, and was finally arrested by the muddy flats of Lake Amadeus, just as earlier explorers had been by those of Lake Torrens. Returning to the charge again, and yet again, he eventually reached Perth, and returned by another route to the telegraph line at the Peake. On these journeys there was the usual experience of hardship. One stretch of three hundred and twenty-five miles, from water to water, occupied seventeen days. For a length of time the chief subsistence of the party was the eggs of the mallee pheasant. On one occasion, Giles and his man Gibson, when ninety-eight miles from camp on a flying trip, had to return because Gibson's horse knocked up.

Thirty miles from some kegs they had planted, Giles sent on his man with their only horse, telling him, on reaching the kegs, to water and rest it for two hours, then to get on to the camp and send him relief. Giles toiled on till dark, was unable to sleep from thirst, reached the kegs at noon next day, and found two and a half gallons of water left. He was still sixty miles from more water and eighty from food. Gibson had missed the track, and was never heard of again; so no relief came to the lonely, starving, and weary man. He struggled on, often falling insensible, and seldom able to walk more than five miles a day. He preserved life on dried horseflesh eaten raw, for he could not afford water to cook it; but after two days it was all gone. Picking up a dying wallaby thrown from its mother's pouch, he ate it raw. Finally, more dead than alive, he staggered into camp. This incident is given in detail as illustrating the self-denial, indomitable energy, and heroic endurance with which danger and death we c faced, and of which explorers' narratives are full.