Furthermore, Priscilla was set (and made) in Central Australia: South Australia and the Northern Territory. Not NSW. Check your facts first if you’re going to argue what Australia is like with with actual Australians.
so just to drive home the point a bit more:
Thats what a lot of the coast visible from the sea would have looked like pre-european colonization. It’s not all that rugged, but it would have been that densely forested before the colonists arrived and cleared the eastern seaboard for agriculture.
Right, so who was thinking of Foundland when he first got to present-day Canada?
I haven’t been there, but I can read a map or view a satellite picture? Most of NSW there, certainly a good half, is brown. I am quite aware that the coastal regions are green and fairly well watered (not that that means it has a climate anything like the old South Wales, which is also a lot colder, for one thing, and, I am pretty sure, still a lot wetter), but that is not most of the state. I do not think the fact (if it is a fact) that you live there, presumably in the green coastal regions where most of the people do live, necessarily gives you a special insight into what the proportions of arid and non-arid areas are over the state as a whole. To figure that out you would need to look at a map or at statistical data, just like anybody anywhere else.
Anyway, I do not think even you will want to deny that a good chunk of NSW is pretty damn arid (desert or no), and the point is that there is nowhere at all, not even a square inch, that is even remotely arid in the old South Wales.
I do take coremelt’s point, however, that the regions visible from along the coast are quite green and hilly, and these were the only parts that Cook would have been aware of.
snerk
one post too far
Wasn’t all of mainland Australia apart from Western Australia once within New South Wales?
New + South Wales, definitely. The Welsh, by the way, is “Deheubarth Newydd”; “Deheubarth” is South Wales and “Newydd” is New.
Oh, and re: not an inch of desert in South Wales: some of the sand dune scenes in Lawrence of Arabia were shot in South Wales, in Merthyr Mawr.
England. The English tend to conveniently forget about that.
Tasmania too, as was (briefly) New Zealand. There’s a map showing the development of the various jurisdictions here.
No, not at all.
We know from both written accounts and paleontology that at the time of European settlement the East cost was much less densely timbered than it is today. The use of the word forest incorrect for >90% of the coast of NSW, it’s almost entirely woodland, with only tiny pockets of forest. At the time of European settlement the forest were much, much smaller in extent, and the woodlands much, much less densely treed.
I’d like to see your cites for that Blake. It’s apparently an issue of contention at the moment, some people are claiming that the woodlands were less dense but the only paper I can find is specific to central NSW (not coastal areas). Doesn’t seem proven either way from what I can tell and there is still people arguing that a dense cover of woodland was the norm before colonization so it’s not as clear cut as you state.