Here, perhaps, more than anywhere, humanity had had a chance to make a fresh start. The land was absolutely untouched and unknown, and except for the blacks, there was no sign of any previous civilisation whatever: not a scrap of pottery, not a Chinese coin, not even the vestige of a Portuguese fort. Nothing in this strange country seemed to bear the slightest resemblance to the outside world: it was so primitive, so lacking in greenness, so silent, so old.

It was not a measurable manmade antiquity, but an appearance of exhaustion and weariness in the land itself. The very leaves of the trees hung down dejectedly, and they were not so much evergreen as ever-grey, never entirely renewing themselves in the spring, never altogether falling in winter. It was the bark that fell; it dried up and cracked on the tree trunks and then peeled off like the discarded skin of a snake.

Everything was the wrong way about. Midwinter fell in July, and in January summer was at its height; in the bush there were giant birds that never flew, and queer, antediluvian animals that hopped instead of walked or sat munching mutely in the trees. Even the constellations in the sky were upside down and seemed to belong to another system of the sun.

As for the naked aborigines, they were caught in a timeless apathy in which nothing ever changed or progressed; they built no villages, they planted no crops, and except for a few flea-bitten dogs possessed no domestic animals of any kind. They hunted, they slept, just occasionally they decked themselves out for a tribal ceremony, but all the rest was a listless dreaming.

A kind of trance was in the air, a sense of awakening infinitely delayed. In the midsummer heat the land scarcely breathed, but the alien white man, walking though the grey and silent trees, would have the feeling that someone or something was waiting and listening. The smaller birds did not fly away as they did in Europe.

The kookaburra approached, uttered its raucous guffaw, then cocked its head, waiting for a response. The kangaroo stood poised and watching. The earth itself had this same air of expectancy, as though it were willing the rain to fall, as though it were waiting for fertilisation so that it could come to life again.

And in fact an awakening did occur in the south-eastern corner of the continent when the first white settlers arrived in 1788. Somehow European crops were made to grow in land that had never been tilled before, and imported cattle, horses and sheep managed to survive in a country where the farmer had no precedents to guide him.

Every man was a Robinson Crusoe. A flood could and did wipe out a year’s labour in a single day, and when a drought began there was no knowing when it would ever end. Everything was new and had to be begun from the beginning.

But it was a healthy country. Along the coast at least there was a sparkle in the air, a sense of vigour, of light and space, that the colonists had never known in Europe. On the whole it was a mild climate by the sea – they had about as much rain as England and the sun had no more than a Mediterranean warmth – and by 1860 places like Sidney, Melbourne and Adelaide were flourishing settlements.

Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, was by some way the most important of these places; and this had happened with bewildering suddenness. Barely ten years earlier Victoria had been a remote pastoral backwater, an appendage of the older settlement of New South Wales, a place only known vaguely as the Port Phillip district. Most of the little colony’s affairs were managed from Sydney.

No made roads or railways led off to the other Australian colonies, no telegraph existed, and twelve thousand miles of empty ocean divided the settlers from Europe. Apart from Melbourne and Geelong there was not another town worth the name, and it is doubtful if the population of the whole region, which was about the size of England, exceeded 80,000.