of a totally different character, strengthening, as this circumstance
does, the conviction, which is gaining ground in the public mind, that we
have been deluded in expending large sums of money in sending out relief
expeditions which were chiefly employed in exploring available country
for the benefit of the Government and people of Queensland. The cost and
the empty honour has been ours, but theirs has been the substantial
gain."


The reply to this is very simple. In the first place, Howitt had been
sent especially to follow up Burke from the start, and would therefore be
supposed to be searching the country on the direct course. Again, Walker
was--as Landsborough thought--then following the homeward track of the
lost party. The only chance of affording succour to the missing men, left
to Landsborough, was the remote one of accidentally coming upon them.
Nobody could have reasonably supposed that such a costly and elaborately
got up expedition would have degenerated into a scamper across to the
Gulf, and a scramble back over the same country.

Apart from all this, Landsborough did not apply for a lease of any of the
country discovered by him on the search expedition, the country called
Bowen Downs having been his discovery of two years previously, and
considering that he closed his days in comparative poverty, after all his
labour, such insinuations as the above are most unjust, and would be
hardly worthy of comment save for the prominent and adverse notice taken
of it by William Howitt, in general such an impartial historian.

The late William Landsborough first went north to Queensland in 1853. In
1854 Messrs. Landsborough and Ranken formed a station on the Kolan River,
between Gayndah and Gladstone, where between bad seasons and blacks they