In April, 1896, I returned to Australia, and made speed to our new property, which I found to be in every respect as satisfactory as Wilson had told me.  To be in the possession of a good mine, and to find someone anxious to change places on terms mutually agreeable, are two very different things.  We were fortunate, however, in finding a purchaser, but not fortunate enough to bring him up to the scratch with any promptitude.  I had hoped to have had all preparations for the projected expedition complete by the beginning of May, in order that by the time the hot weather came on we should be well on our way, if not at the end of our journey.  The Fates ordered things differently, and it was not until the middle of June that I was free to turn my attention to the thousand and one details connected with the composition and equipment of my party.

With what keenness I entered into the preparations may be well imagined, for now at last I was in a position to undertake the expedition I had so long in my mind.  In order to explain what my object was, and what my plan of procedure was to be, it will be necessary to give a short sketch of the history of exploration and advance of settlement in Western Australia.  The Colony, occupying one third of the continent, has an extreme length of 1,500 miles and a breadth of one thousand miles.  The length of coast-line exceeds three thousand miles.  A most noticeable feature of the coast-line on the South is the entire absence of rivers—­for nearly seven hundred miles no rivers or even watercourses are met with.  Along the Western coast rivers are fairly frequent, the largest being the Swan, Murchison, Gascoyne, Ashburton, the Fortescue, and De Grey.  The Swan, on which the capital is situated, is the most important—­the rivers North of this are not always running, the seasons in the country where they rise being very unreliable.  Further North again, where Warburton’s Desert abuts on the sea, we find an inhospitable sandy beach (the Eighty-mile Beach), along which no river mouths are seen.  In the far North, the Kimberley Division, the coast-line is considerably indented by bays, gulfs, and the mouths of rivers of fair size, which run for the greater part of the year; of these the most important are the Fitzroy, Lennard, Prince Regent, and Ord.  The Colony can boast of no great mountain ranges, the highest, the Darling Range, being something over 2,000 feet.  The Leopold range in the north is of about the same altitude.  No mountain chain breaks the monotony of the central portions of the Colony.  In the interior hills are called mountains, and a line of hills, ranges, for want of a better name.

The first settlement was formed on the Swan River in 1826, and gradually spread to the South and North, until to-day we find the occupied portion of the Colony extending along the western seaboard for about 1,200 miles, with an average breadth of perhaps two hundred miles.  In the North the occupied country is confined to the watersheds of the two main rivers, the Fitzroy and the Ord.