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Have you ever been homesick? If you haven’t, then you have never been far away from home for any length of time, or you never had a home. Just suppose you lived on the other side of the World from your father and mother, from your sisters, brothers, and friends, and were only able to get home once in five or ten years, ormaybe never. The English people probably love their homes more and get more homesick than any other people in the World, and yet they go farthest away from home and live there.
There is a big island, so big that it is usually called a continent and so far off from England that it usedto take five or six months, a half year, to get to it from England, and even now it takes a month or more byship. On it lived only wild black men, yet the English people went there, built great cities and now rule over the island. This island is Australia, which means “South Land,” for it is far, far south—south of the Equator, where it is summer when it is winter here and night when it is day here. The island was so far awaythe English thought it would be a good place to send prisoners, to get rid of them, because once there they could not get away and they could not harm anybody but themselves. Many prisoners were sent there and few ofthem ever came back. Some even died of homesickness, for even a criminal is human and gets homesick.
It was not very long, however, before the English found that this island was too good just for prisoners. The central part of Australia was a desert, but there were gold mines in the desert, and neither a desert nor danger will keep men away when gold, magic gold, is to be found. So a great many young Englishmen went out to Australia in search of gold and to make their fortunes, expecting to return home as soon as they had done so.
