country bordering on them; the one constantly receiving great accession
of water from four streams, and as liberally rendering fertile a great
extent of country, whilst the other, from its source to its termination,
is constantly diffusing and diminishing the waters it originally receives
over low and barren deserts, creating only wet flats and uninhabitable
morasses, and during its protracted and sinuous course, is never indebted
to a single tributary stream."


Oxley having successfully carried through the Lachlan expedition, was at
once selected to command a similar one down the Macquarie, on which, now
that the former river had so disappointed expectations, men's hopes were
fixed. Oxley seems to have been particularly unhappy in his deductions,
every guess hazarded by him as to the future utility of the country he
passed over, or the probable nature of the farther interior, was
incorrect; and now the Macquarie was to refuse to bear his boat's keel to
the westward; after the same manner as the Lachlan.

In those days men had not yet mastered the idea that the physical
formation of Australia was not to be worked out on the same lines as that
of other countries; they looked vainly for a river with a wide and noble
opening, and none being found on the surveyed coast, conjecture placed it
far away in a few leagues of unexplored shore line on the north-west. The
constancy with which the southern coast had been examined, precluded all
idea from men's minds that the entrance to this long sought river was
there. No, it must be yet undiscovered to the westward. Wentworth says:--


"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