Oil. - Petroleum. (Correspondence, &c., Respecting Existence of, in New South Wales.)

Sydney, Govt Printer 1867. Foolscap folio sewn as issued (a bit used); 22pp, litho map & 2 plates, illustrations through the text. ¶ The first publication of any note on petroleum in Australia, or at least the possibility of it, and necessary investigations, results of examinations, and so on. The search seems to have been kicked off in 1866 by William Fane de Salis sending out a copy of Lesley's 1865 paper on the Kentucky petroleum basin, 'the only paper as yet published giving any reliable scientific account of the strata' in the hopes that comparative work could be done. That paper is reprinted here, from the copy kindly given by Murchison. What is not in this paper but is in the columns of The Empire is that the Minister for Lands ignored the offer of de Salis and that a Lands Department clerk responded 'the Minister for Lands does not consider it advisable to republish Mr Lesley's pamphlet as proposed by you'. Neither would the Lands Department, 'this incubus'. release Lesley's paper for The Empire to print, prompting the outraged columnist of The Empire to mutter darkly about the 'little games played some time ago in the matter of certain mineral lands at Illawarra'. 'Is there a disinterested and intelligent man in the colony who does not believe in his heart that the blowing of the Lands Office into perdition, with all its accumulated stores of red tape, useless maps, and sickening arrears of correspondence, would be one of the best things that could happen for the welfare of the community?' All this is not quite true, the correspondence in this paper tells a slightly different story but still, in all this is an education in the power of print, most obvious in the ability of the press to push along a recalcitrant bureaucracy but more interesting is the potency held by what was considered the sole copy of an otherwise unobtainable pamphlet. Lesley's paper itself is rare, certainly it was missed by Swanson's bibliography of oil and gas. It's almost unnecessary to add that this Australian paper also doesn't appear.

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