Impressions of that immense country generally referred to as the Inland vary markedly with each visit. I have had four trips into the centre of it and have gathered just about enough knowledge to show me the folly of being dogmatic. Its very size makes judgment hazardous. A cattle-station there may be greater than a European country; one in the north-west contains nine and a quarter million acres. I came one day to a more southern station the area of which was several thousand square miles. "Where are your men?" I asked. "Down the paddock," returned the manager. "Whereabouts?" I continued. "About seventy miles away!" was the staggering reply. Another man, the lessee himself this time, told me that his front gate was, in a direct line, eighty miles from his front door.
In those vast spaces the observer, if he is not altogether egoist, feels himself reduced to the insignificance of an ant. Kipling has said that an admiral knows a midshipman much as the Almighty knows a black beetle. Stand on one of those seemingly boundless gibber plains, the horizon of the whole circle as unbroken as if you were far out on the ocean, stand there if you wish to know your own proportion in the scale of the visible world.
