UNOCCUPIED WASTES

Taranaki Daily News, 6 April 1932, Page 12

UNOCCUPIED WASTES

GREAT AUSTRALIAN AREA.

TASMANIA'S ■ VAST HINTERLAND.

Australia has still vast areas in which there is not a single permanent white inhabitant. The largest of these blank spaces is the' region, larger than New South Wales, lying to the west of the centre of . the continent. Here, mainly in Western Australia, .but including parts of South Australia and of the Northern Territory, says the Sydney Daily Teegraph, is a vast block a tenth of the Common wealth, into which the w i e man comes only as a wanderer and a bird of passage. . Another “empty quarter—as the Arabs call the great desert of Southern Arabia—-is the Arnheim Land region, nearly as large as Victoria and inhabite only by blackfellows. There are . big patches of country without white inhabitants in the Kimberley region of Western 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 islapd have long been extinct. In the south and south-west there is a region of 1000 square miles, or more than a quarter of • the island, in which snot one human being lives permanently. The Tasmanian “tiger,” that marsupial beast of prey confined to the island, is still fair y numerous in ' some of this country, though almost extinct elsewhere. This large area 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 ■* U A keen anthropologist and zoologist, Mr. Donald Thomson, of Melbourne, will leave Brisbane in April 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 hus>and to study that side. . A launch, which is now being fitted out in Brisbane, will land the two scientists on the east side of Cape York Peninsula, away to- the north of Cooktown. After 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 of Carpentaria, Mornington, Groote Eylandt, Van der Lin and others' and go on later to Arnheim Land. . . It is the firm belief of Mr. A. S. le Souef, curator of the Taronga Park Zoo, in Sydney, that a large marsupial beast of 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 Kim'berleys, of which only one specimen is known — something unique in the world. It seems to be intermediate between the opossum 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.