Cirrus@Austlit

Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing

Thomas Livingstone Mitchell (1792-1855) was an explorer and surveyor-general of New South Wales. He worked as both Assistant Surveyor-General and later Surveyor-General of New South Wales from 1827-1855. The account of his explorations is presented in Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; With Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales. This extensively illustrated two-volume travel narrative is a traditional exploration text that detailed the party's route throughout the Australian outback, the temperature, geographical locations, discoveries, and daily incidents of travel. Mitchell prefaced the work with a statement about Australia: "Though Australia calls up no historical recollection, no classical associations of ideas, it has other, and not less valid titles to our attention. It is a new and vast country, over the largest portion of which a veil of mystery still hangs." Volume I contained a description of Mitchell's journey in search of the Kindur in 1831-2 and Volume II included an account of an expedition to the Rivers Darling and Murray in the 1836. Mitchell also published Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (1848).