VAST REGIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 14 April 1932, Page 12

VAST REGIONS

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 r>oint 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 CommonAvealth, into which the white man conies only as a wanderer and a bird of passage. Another “empty quarter” (as the Arabs call the great desert of Southern Arabia) is the Aniheim Land region, nearly as large as Victoria, and inhabited only by black fellows. There are 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 soulh-west there is a region of 7000 square miles, or more than a quarter of the island, in which not one human being lives permanently. Tlie 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 Avere 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, Avhere the aborigines are still the only inhabitants. I’lant life will receive attention, too, for Mrs. Thomson, Avho is a botanist, will go with her husband to study that side. A launch, which has been fitted out in Brisbane, will ig-nd the two scientists on the east side of Cape York Peninsula, aAvay 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, 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 squamaeandatus, 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 etill some surprises to offer.