CHEWINGS, Charles

The Sources of the Finke River.

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W.K. Thomas & Co., Grenfell Street Adelaide, 1886. Octavo, original pale blue wrappers bound in; very good, in recent quarter green morocco. A real rarity, and an important contribution to the study of northwest Australia, and to the work of J. McDouall Stuart and Ernest Giles in particular. The Finke is the chief river of Central Australia, rising south of Mount Zeil in the MacDonnell Ranges; it was first charted by Stuart in 1860, and includes the remarkable Glen Helen Gorge.

Chewings (1859-1937) was a geologist and anthropologist, and a notable pioneer in the study of Aboriginal culture. In 1881 he set out alone with two camels to explore the possibility of establishing a cattle-run in the western MacDonnell Ranges, and two years later travelled from Murat Bay to the Warburton Range to assess the area's pastoral possibilities. He made his third and last great expedition in 1885, as a result of which he also more fully stocked his cattle-run Tempe Downs.

Convinced of the interior's excellent pastoral prospects, Chewings became a strong advocate for a railway to facilitate settlement. In a long and varied career he also published papers on fossils and geology in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, and after being elected to fellowships of the Royal Geographical and Geological societies in London, published papers on the region in their Proceedings. In his later life he was a mining consultant in central and western Australia, and continued to be active in opening up the interior. His experience in outback Australia also meant that he was in regular contact with indigenous tribes, and he published a popular account of them in 1936 as well as a vocabulary of the Aranda.

He published reports on all three of his treks in the Adelaide Observer, but this is the only one to have also been issued in book form as this rare offprint. Ferguson listed three copies (Mitchell, NLA, South Australia). Unusually, the copy in the Davidson collection had a map, not called for by Ferguson, and certainly not required to be considered complete.
Ferguson, 8120.

• AUD 4,400.00 > Andere Währungen
• Bestellnummer: 701_834

• Antiquariat: Hordern House (AUSTRALIA)