Staff from the Charles Sturt University (CSU) School of Communication gathered in Bathurst’s Machattie Park on Thursday 12 February to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. When Darwin voyaged to Australia in 1836, Bathurst was the most westward point of his inland journey, and when his book On the Origin of Species was published in November 1859, it changed the scientific understanding of life on Earth. At the commemorative morning tea in the park’s rotunda yesterday, CSU Professor of Communication, John Carroll, read extracts from Darwin’s journal to the gathering which also included members of the Bathurst branch of the Pensioners and Superannuants Association. Writing on 20 and 21 January 1836, Darwin observed ‘Bathurst has a singular and not very inviting appearance; groups of small houses, and a few large ones, are scattered rather thickly over two or three miles of a bare country which is divided into numerous fields’. He described conditions as hot, dry and dusty, noting the Macquarie River was a ‘mere chain of ponds … separated from each other by spaces almost dry’, but added ‘a little water does flow, and sometimes there are high and most impetuous floods’. He acknowledged that ‘the season had been one of great drought, and that the country does not at present wear a favourable aspect; although I understand two or three months ago it was incomparably worse’. T’was ever thus.