APPENDIX
The foregoing pages would, I fear, give the reader a very bad impression of the Colony of West Australia, until it was fully understood that my experiences relate solely to the interior and to that part of the interior the borders of which can only be reached by a journey of some four hundred miles by train from the coast—that part of the Colony, in fact, which lies to the East of longitude 121 degrees.
Now West Australia is so large that, despite the desert nature of so much of it, there still remain many thousand square miles of country suitable for settlement and rich in mineral wealth.
The settled portions show a picture the reverse of that I have been compelled to exhibit in the course of my travels.
The Colony altogether covers no less an area than 975,920 square miles, a little over eight times the area of Great Britain and Ireland. It occupies the whole of the continent West of the he 129th east meridian. In 1826 a party of soldiers and convicts formed the first settlement at King George’s Sound. Three years later a settlement was established on the banks of the Swan River. From this modest beginning the progress of the settlement, which at first was slow in the extreme, came with a rush on the discovery of gold. The population of the Colony now exceeds 150,000 souls, and there can be no doubt that this population will be substantially added to annually, when the advantages which the country possesses, over and beyond its auriferous districts, come to be more generally known and recognised.