UNKNOWN AUSTRALIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 April 1932, Page 9

UNKNOWN AUSTRALIA

EXPEDITION PROJECTED. Australia has still vast areas in which there is not a single permanent white inhabitant, says the Sydney “Daily Telegraph.” The largest of these (from our point of view) blank spaces is the region, larger than New South Wales, lying to the west of the centre of the continent. Here, mainly in West Australia, but including parts of South Australia and of the Northern Territory, is a vast block, a tenth of the Commonwealth, into which the white man comes only as a wanderer and a bird of passageAnother “empty quarter” (as the Arabs call the great desert of Southern Arabia) is the Arnheim Land region, nearly as large as Victoria, and inhabited only by blackfellows. There arc big patches of country without white inhabitants in the Kimberley region of West Australia, between Derby and Wyndham, and on Cape York Peninsula. All these, however, have native inhabitants- Even in the most arid regions of the great central area the wandering aborigines contrive to make a living. Strangely enough the' largest piece of absolutely uninhabited country probably lies in the’ smallest State— Tasmania.

The aborigines of the island have long been extinct. In the south and south-west there is a region of 7000 square miles, in which not one human being lives permanently. The Tasmanian -“tiger,” that marsupial beast of prey confined to the island, is still fairly numerous in some of this country, though almost extinct elsewhere.

It has many other features of interest, and Professor Thomson Flynn, formerly of Hobart, and now of Queen’s University, Belfast, found British experts keenly alive to what it might have to offer from the scientific point of view. He put forward last year tentative suggestions for a scientific expedition. These were favourably received, but nothing is likely to be done just yet. A keen anthropologist and zoologist, Donald Thomson, of Melbourne, will be leaving Brisbane this month to study human and animal life in some of the northern regions, where the aborigines are still the only inhabitants. Plant life will receive attention, too, for Mrs Thomson, who is a botanist, will go with her husband to study that side. A launch, which has been fitted out n Brisbane, will land the two scientists on the east side of Cape York Peninsula, away to-the north of Cooktown.

Alter examining the less-known parts of this country, they will be picked up on the west coast by. the launch, visit the islands in the Gulf cf Carpentaria, Mornington, Groote Eylandt, Van der Lin, and others, and go on later to Arnheim Band-

it is the firm belief of Mr A. S. le Souef, curator of the Taronga Park Zoo, that a large marsupial beast ot prey, perhaps akin to the Tasmanian tiger, still exists in the Cape York region. And in the Perth Museum there is an animal, the Wyulda squamacandatus, from Violet Valley, in the Kimberleys, of which only one specimen is known—something unique in the world. It seems to be intermediate between the ’possum and the cuxus of the .Malay Islands. It is quite possible, therefore, that the lesser known parts of Australia have still some surprises to offer.