Early in the 1870’s, during a lull in his work as a Queensland Surveyor, my great great Grandfather, George Chale Watson was appointed to join a voyage to the South Seas. The purpose of the voyage was to return South Sea Islanders who had been engaged to work on Queensland sugar plantations and to recruit more Islanders. This is his account of that voyage.
The appearance of the following pages occurs in consequence of a voyage through Polynesia being vividly recalled to mind by the perusal of a very impressive article, which appeared in “Cosmos”, and Australian Magazine, of November 1984, from the pen of Annie Besant where the following striking passage occur:-
“When the vast Continent that once spread where now the Indian Ocean rolls, the continent of which Australia was the southernmost point, and of which the mountain tops are still to be found in the Islands of Polynesia: when that continent was peopled with a vast population, and Lemurian cities flung back the rays of the sun from his mighty temples, golden roofed, in those far off days the Divine science was taught, and Lemurian races bowed at the feet of the Divine Instructors.
When Lemuria perished by volcanic fires and left but a scattered frament to mark where it once stood….
But for us it will be enough to trace the Divine wisdom from the beginnings of our own, the Aryan race, which lay in its infancy on the mother breast of Asia, and whose cradle was rocked beneath the shelter of the Himalayan peaks. Round the cradle gathered the noble brotherhood of the Divine initiates, the guardians of the ancient teaching, whose strong hands had carried it safely through Lemurian fires and Atlantean floods; and there were the teachers of the child humanity when re-incarnated as the fifth race, or Aryan man, it opened its eyes on Asian heavens and on Indian plains.”
Meeting with these impressive sentences when passing through Longreach, a town in Central Australia, surrounded in a favorable year with well grassed plains, I could not divest my mind of thoughts that had been awakened in breathing the enchanted atmosphere of sunny Australia, so highly ratified that to breathe therein seemed to be breathing in an ocean of life; wherein echoes might even be heard of the ancient heavens and the Indian plains announcing that the territory whereon I stood was a part of the vast Ancient Lemuria.
And as these thoughts travel through my mind I observe in the distance the town I had passed through, with a prominent display of corrugated iron roofs flinging back the rays of the bright Australian sunshine that pours down upon them with an intensity sufficient to generate an electric force more than adequate to drive all the machinery of the Southern Hemisphere, so that recognising that a great Commonwealth is destined to unify all these realms, meditation evolves the great query – Can it be hoped that the unborn generations of the coming Australian Nation will bow at the feet of a Guiding intelligence?
That in Australia we stand upon enchanted ground seems undeniable; in reflecting thereon I call to mind the eventful voyage through Polynesia, when I verily sailed through the submerged mountain tops of a part of Ancient Lemuria. Accordingly, as a result of that voyage, I will now introduce the reader to some of our neighbours with whom, in our Australian Commonwealth, we are called to make an acquaintance, with relics to be found on those mountain tops – amongst them undoubtedly.
- Kanakas A Remnant of Lemuria – Voyage Begins
- Tanna – First Port of Call
- Blood Stained Shores of Erromanga
- A Harvest ot Retribution and Reprisals – Sandwich Islands
- Engaging in Trade – Returning Islanders
- Appointments for a Cannibal Feast
- Friendly and Peaceful Inhabitants
- Aoba Chief Gives Signal to Attack
- Death at Sea
- Custodian of the Islands
- Scudding Home – Fiddlers Green
Wild Mother Calling 