In 1831, when Thomas Mitchell set off on his Journey into the Interior, he started the account metaphorically at Elizabeth Farm, in ‘A Garden’.  The description of Macarthur’s estate served both as a symbolic starting point for his journey into the unknown,  and also as a contrast to what he would describe as he journeyed into ‘the wilds’, leaving first the elegant houses, the gardens, the fields and, finally, even the scattered sheep-herds of the colony behind.

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