Thus a new continent was added to the British Empire. It was occupied by only a few score thousand native blacks, and was believed to be uninhabitable by civilised people unless possibly along a strip of land south of the Tropic of Capricorn on the eastern, western, and southern shores of the continent. Of the north-west Dampier had written: "The land is of a dry, sandy soil, destitute of water, unless you make wells, yet producing divers sorts of trees." Cook occasionally found difficulty in getting water unless by sinking in the shore sand; he made no attempt to penetrate the fringe of coast or even to explore its inlets. It was not until 1798 that Flinders and Bass discovered the channel through Bass Strait, and the former's discoveries may be said to have completed the coast map of Australia. By successive proclamations six colonies were subsequently constituted, the last being that of Queensland on 10th December, 1859. On 1st January, 1901, Queen Victoria's proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia was formally made at Melbourne, the prescribed place for the sitting of the Parliament until the federal seat of government had been determined. This important step was taken 131 years after Captain Cook had annexed the eastern coast at Possession Island, and 72 years after Captain Fremantle made the possession of the continent as British territory complete by hoisting the flag at Swan River. The story of Australian land exploration is a long one, and it would, if complete, reveal many a startling tale of privation and death. The earliest exploring expeditions were those of Governor Phillip, in 1789, when he set out from Sydney to discover Broken Bay first, and then explore the Hawkesbury River.[d] At that time the undertaking no doubt seemed great, but to-day Broken Bay may almost be regarded as a suburb of Sydney. In the same year Captain Tench discovered the Nepean River. By the end of the eighteenth century, despite many expeditions, the total of the discoveries were the rivers Hawkesbury, Nepean, Grose, and Hunter, and the fertile Illawarra district to the south of Sydney. In 1813 Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth discovered a pass over the Blue Mountains, and opened the way to the interior. Later in the same year, following in their footsteps, George William Evans discovered a river flowing inland, which he named the Macquarie, and that led to the discovery of the Bathurst Plains, and other country beyond the Blue Mountains. John Oxley, who in 1817 penetrated the country until he struck rivers flowing to the south-west, found himself in shallow stagnant swamps, with no indication that the rivers reached the sea. Oxley and Evans made further discoveries to the north-west of Sydney during the next seven years, the principal result being the finding of Liverpool Plains. Cunningham, the botanist, also was in the field of exploration in 1823. In the year 1824 Hume, accompanied by W. H. Hovell, crossed the Murrumbidgee River, and some