This is Australia [antikvár]

THE LAND Olaf Ruhen 'By the time a second generation grew . . . they had come to love the country . . Ernest Favenc the explorer discovered fine country in Queensland below the Gulf of Carpentaria and on over the Barkly Tableland to Darwin, but he must have carried disappointment like an ill-balanced pack, for what he really sought did not exist, never had, never could. His good mind must have told him so, over and over. Exploration fascinated him; his History of Austral Exploration from 1788 to 1888 is authoritative, and in the motivations of other explorers he must have recognised desires akin to his own. Yet he dreamed of finding a civilisation beyond the horizons, or the relics of one, created by people whose inheritance mirrored the likeness of his own. Eleven years after his explorations ceased he wrote a fanciful novel about Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom de Bye, the two Dutchmen marooned in 1629 for their part in the massacres connected with the Batavia shipwreck on the Abrolhos Islands off the Western Australian coast. In Favenc's reconstruction they travelled north and discovered a kingdom of civilised people whom he made responsible for the Wandjina art Sir George Grey had discovered in 1836. This was the wildest fiction, but in an appendix Favenc discussed the possibility of the existence in north-west Australia at some previous time of a colony of semi-civilised people. 'The non-existence of ruins of any sort can easily be accounted for by the fact that they built their houses of mud which, after being abandoned to the mercy of successive tropical wet seasons, would soon disappear,' he wrote. Favenc was not alone in his search for something, for anything with which, as a 19th century man, he could identify. Long before the discovery of the Opposite: Early morning light on the mangrove-hned estuaries vein-ing tidal flats on the north-west coast between Derby and Cockatoo Island, WA.