AustLit

'EARLY in the morning of January 12, 1836, the young naturalist Charles Darwin, on board the Royal Navy's HMS Beagle, caught his first glimpse of Sydney Harbour and the fledgling colony of New South Wales. He expected wonders: but what he saw, as he wrote that day in his diary, was a level landscape, "bare and horizontal strata of sandstone, covered by woods of thin, scrubby trees that bespoke useless sterility". Darwin was close to his 27th birthday and fresh from the Galapagos Islands, his mind brimming with rich, strange impressions, an instinct for pattern and order coming alive inside his heart. ' (p25)