PART VI. TO THE NORTHERN TERRITORY

XX. THE GREAT BARRIER REEF 245

XXI. THE NORTHERN TERRITORY 272

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ILLUSTRATION ON THE COVER OF A CLEARING IN THE BUSH IS FROM A

WATER-COLOUR IN THE POSSESSION OF MAJOR C. J. MARTIN, F.R.G.S.

KARRI COUNTRY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA _Frontispiece_

_Facing page_

PERTH FROM “THE NARROWS” 20

FELLING KARRI 43

OXEN HARNESSED TO A LOG AT BIG BROOK 49

ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD, BRIDGETOWN 59

THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA 63

NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE 89

WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE 94

WATERFALL GULLY, BURNSIDE, NEAR ADELAIDE 104

OSTRICH FARM, SOOTH AUSTRALIA 108

THE RIVER YARRA, FORTY-EIGHT MILES FROM MELBOURNE 122

THE AUSTRALIAN ALPS, NORTH-EAST VICTORIA, MOUNT FEATHERTOP, 6,300 143

THE DIVIDING RANGE 147

TREE FERNS IN THE BUSH, NEAR MELBOURNE 155

VIEW OF THE AUSTRALIAN ALPS FROM THE MURRAY RIVER FLATS 158

CIRCULAR QUAY, SYDNEY 178

SOUTH COAST, NEW SOUTH WALES 180

NATIONAL PASS, BLUE MOUNTAINS 188

SHEARING TIME, NEW SOUTH WALES 193

A FLOCK OF SHEEP, KINROSS STATION 195

MANLY BEACH 198

THE BRISBANE RIVER 214

CHARLEVILLE BORE 218

NAMBOUR 226

BOTANIC GARDENS, BRISBANE 238

TOWNSVILLE 248

BARRON FALLS SCENERY AT CAIRNS 254

THE BARRON RIVER 258

THURSDAY ISLAND 265

VIEW NEAR DARWIN 275

COCONUT GROVE, DARWIN 279

ANTHILLS, NORTHERN TERRITORY 289

PART I

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

[Illustration:

MAP OF

AUSTRALIA

to illustrate

“RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA”

_George Philip & Son Ltd_

Mills & Boon Ltd]

RAMBLES IN AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY: THE LAND OF THE UNLATCHED DOOR

Opposite to us was Australia. During the long days of the voyage across

the bleak South Indian Ocean it had seemed no more than a vague area

on a map, small, as all countries and even continents are, compared

to the interminable stretches of the sea. But the voyage was ended

now, and Australia, first no more than a blur on the horizon, and then

solidifying into a shore with green trees, had now become resolved into

an island with a lighthouse; and now into a harbour with wharves and

quays and a background of houses behind the sheds and derricks. There

was a train puffing in the distance; and here fussed a launch bringing

with it people from the shore....

Quite suddenly the Blue Funnel Liner which has had the accustomedness

of a home to us for all these weeks, shrinks to the aspect of a ship,

of no more importance to us than a passenger train; and impatience

seizes us to be off. There is the land, alluring in a glow of sunset

barred with feathery clouds ... there’s a shore breeze calling, let us

go!

So much for the emotions of arrival. They are quickly submerged by

occurrences which are no less stubborn in the poetic moments of

reaching a new land, than at any other time. The Blue Funnel Liner had

been behind her time, and had not wired her subsequent gain of a few

hours; our arrival had been expected, and was to have been made the

occasion of a greeting by the Government of Western Australia to the

members of a scientific mission on board. Western Australia’s first

greeting was to have taken the form of a garden party at Government

House, Perth; and as the invitations had been distributed over

hundreds of miles of a wide country weeks before, no postponement

had been possible. The garden party was being held--in our regretted

absence--and the Port Medical Authorities, not to be done out of their

festivity, had gone to it. So there Western Australia was--at our

garden party, and there peering at the land of promise were we.

Hours went by. Those of us who had hastened over lunch and wrestled

impatiently with trunks and hold-alls that be they attacked ever so

early never can be packed at leisure, wandered about the decks, finding

that they had lost their friendliness with their deck chairs, and had

become as little homelike as a railway platform. The deck-steward, who

had become merely a deck-steward instead of philosopher and friend,

recovered some of his old standing by telling us that we were to have

an early dinner on board, after all. But it was an empty meal. We so

much desired to be gone. And at last we were. The sunset had faded,

the swift dusk had deepened into night, when at last we went down the

gangway and stood in Australia.... It was Australia, though beneath our

feet were the planks and rails of a wharf. The French have a proverb

that at night all cats are grey. This wharf, might it not have been the

wharf at Liverpool or Tilbury? Not quite. There was the Southern Cross

overhead; and in the warm darkness there was a something--something

that was not England.

The party that had been so long companions split up and were scattered.

The writer of these lines became for an hour or so more single than

any of them, for business took him at once into Perth, where he

had to find Reuter’s Agency. So looking back, and sorting out his

recollections, he remembers first the friendly host that met him and

walked to the railway station at Fremantle; and after that the Swan

River shining in the starlight as the train crossed it; and after that

nothing but the soft Australian night stealing in through the open

carriage windows and seeming to come through whispering trees--until

the train drew up at the lighted terminus of Perth. And Perth? In the

darkness it was much like any other town at which one should arrive at

night. Not like Paris, where, as a Frenchwoman in Bâle once said to

us, at ten o’clock “Ça commence,” nor yet like London, where, in times

of peace, the streets are still open-eyed. But not unlike a provincial

town; with some shops still brightly lighted, though most of them and

the office buildings, are shut; a town with lights, but not lit; and

with streets that are kept awake only by the street lamps. Through

one such street I tracked down the office I sought, receiving much

friendly aid by the way; and finally arriving at it in company with the

publisher’s clerk of the Perth newspaper.

That is another outstanding recollection: the publishing office with

two clerks, one rather sleepy, the other painstakingly deciphering an

obituary notice which a small girl had brought in. When he had at last

made it out, and felt that he could leave the office for a few minutes

in charge of his companion, he put on his hat and said he would come

with me. So he did. As a matter of history his kindness was unavailing,

except to make me feel that Australia was filled with friends, for the

office we wanted was vacant. So back I went through the gaunt streets

and on to the railway station, where I was too new to the country to

disregard the notice that smoking was not allowed on the platform; and

presently the train was again taking me back to the suburb of Cottesloe

Beach.

This was a country railway station, evidently. Just like one at home,

to the two lighted shops just outside, and the white road stretching up

a hill in the starlight. The road up which I was directed was dotted

with houses wide apart; with shaded lamps which I could see through

the shrubs; and now and again a piano tinkling. It was very still. At

last I found the house I sought. Very white, with trees about it, and

a windmill for its well; and windows lighted for the stranger. No; not

the stranger, but the unknown, welcome guest. The gate in the wooden

fence was swung back; there was a light in the hall; and the hall door

was wide open, though the hall was empty. And that was how I thought

then, and have always thought of Australia. It is the “Land of the

Unlatched Door.”

CHAPTER II

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It behoves visitors to Australia to realise that they will have a good

many things to do for themselves that they have never done before, and

that the conditions of travelling, for instance, are very different

from those in Europe. To begin with, the station porter is absent,

and everyone has to carry his own hand baggage, for in a country,

where labour is very scarce and very highly paid, there are no loafers

ready to scramble for odd jobs, even at a port. What cannot be carried

ashore by the passengers is left to be dealt with, frequently much to

its detriment, by agencies whose representatives come on board for

the purpose and convey it, or some of it, to its owner’s destination.

Stray packages, providentially arrive in time to go on to the next

stopping-place with their owner. This applies not only to landing, but

to railway travelling; so that it can easily be arranged for by those

who are prepared in advance.

It was quite dark when we went ashore, and it is the oddest sensation

to land in an unknown country after dark. We had been told on the

boat that the station was at a distance of ten minutes’ walk, but in

the absence of cabs and porters its whereabouts was problematical. We

therefore deposited our bags and awaited events.

Then out of the obscurity a man came up with some hesitation and asked

us our names. It was our host, who had been guided to us in the dark by

some occult sense, for we were unknown to each other except by name. He

greeted us heartily with the kindly solicitude of an old friend, took

possession of us and the larger share of our hand baggage, and carried

us off to the station.

It was our first experience of an Australian welcome and Australian

hospitality; that hospitality, which for unaffected kindness and

generosity, can surely have no counterpart on any other continent. The

hospitality that makes a guest free of all his host’s possessions,

that grudges no time or trouble in his guests’ interest, and that is

bestowed in the spirit not of a giver, but the receiver of a benefit.

As we walked towards the train the ground seemed curiously soft, as if

we were walking ankle-deep in dust. It was not till next day that we

found that this part of Western Australia consists everywhere of loose

yellow sand like that by the seashore. The night was very mild after

the keen sea air, and encumbered with bags and our heavy coats, we

arrived at the station in time to see the train go out, and waited for

the next one in a large empty booking-hall. At last the little train

rattled in, and we started. We crossed the broad Swan River, above

which a crescent moon was hanging, and Venus shone with the luminous

brilliancy of southern skies. One of us went on to Perth: the other

descended at Cottesloe Beach.

Here the station fly was waiting. It was shaped like a French diligence

and drawn by two ruminative old white horses. The driver, surprised and

startled at the apparition of a fare, climbed down, and lit a candle

inside the fly, the light of which disclosed white lace curtains at

the windows tied up with red ribbon. A few minutes jolting drive, and

we were at our destination, and, jumping out, plunged immediately into

soft, deep sand, before the entrance to a large one-storied house, its

corrugated iron white-painted roof shining in the starlight as if it

were covered with snow.

Our hostess, who had waited dinner for us an unconscionable time, had

neither allowed that, nor her welcome to get cold in the interim, and

took us to a room sweet with the scent of a great bowl of wattle, and a

bunch of very large, deep purple violets--a room that seemed strangely

quiet after the long-heard straining and cracking of the timbers in our

cabin. Here our sleep was lulled only by the fitful creaking of the

little windmill in the garden.

The charming house in which we stayed at Cottesloe Beach was typical

of nearly all West Australian houses. It stood, as even the smallest

workman’s cottage stands, in its own grounds detached from its

neighbours’, a roomy bungalow with a broad verandah running right

round it. The verandah is an essential, all-important part of a West

Australian house. The family sleep in it all the year round, using the

bedrooms merely as dressing-rooms; they live on another side of it

during the day.

In the country suburbs the houses are built on piles to protect them

from the attacks of white ants. White ants can eat everything except

jarrah, a hard red eucalyptus wood, which has been tried for paving

London streets. The foundations of all the houses are formed of jarrah

piles; on the top of every pile is put an iron saucer, and on this

again is erected the superstructure of the building. The iron saucer

is indispensable, and, “capping the pile,” takes the place of laying

the foundation-stone. The white ants can neither penetrate it, nor run

outside it, for they won’t come into the light.

An immense corrugated galvanised iron water-tank stands beside every

house, and most of the larger ones have their own windmill for pumping

up water.

All the gardens were gay with flowers in this beautiful climate,

even at the end of the winter. Masses of purple kennedya,[1] a showy

climbing plant with a small pealike flower, hung from a high wooden

fence surrounding our host’s house. Geraniums grew like shrubs, and a

magenta bougainvillea was a curtain of colour.

We arrived in Australia with the wattle; the mimosa sold in London

shops can give but little idea of its trees, shining like cloth of gold

among the grey eucalyptus, and outlining the streams. It is comparable

to our hawthorn, though it is not in the same way a harbinger of

spring, for the mild and flowery winters have no terrors. Australians

are immensely proud of their wattle. They never lose an opportunity

of commenting on its beauty, and just as no two Irishmen can agree

on the exact identity of the Irish shamrock among a variety of small

trefoils, so wherever you go in Australia a different variety of mimosa

is pointed out as the “true” Australian wattle.

One soon takes as a matter of course the brilliant unvarying Australian

sunshine, but on our first walk the day after our arrival, it seemed

as if we were wandering in a land of limelight; its hard dazzling

white brilliance appeared artificial and unreal. There seemed to be

an absence of chiaroscuro, and of atmosphere, the clear-cut distance

gave an illusory impression of nearness, annihilating perspective; the

eucalyptus with their light, springing branches, sparsely covered with

long, narrow leaves, give little shade. From pictures and photographs

one is led to suppose that Australian scenery is not unlike that

of England. It is wholly and entirely different, not only in its

atmospheric effect, and in the more uniform and heavier colouring of

its foliage, but every individual plant is unfamiliar. Australia, one

may say, roughly speaking, is one vast forest of eucalyptus or gum

tree. The gums have many varieties, far too numerous for the traveller

to distinguish, from the slight pale trees that are not unlike a

silver-barked birch, to the soaring giants of the karri forest, with

their smooth white stems; but whatever the variety, the prevailing

tinge is a bluish grey. Sometimes the forest or “bush” has been cleared

away to make room for orchards, and crops, or towns, or grazing land;

sometimes acres of trees have been “ringbarked,” as it is called, a

rapid and cheap way of clearing land, by cutting out a ring of bark

so that the tree dies, and only a skeleton forest remains, letting in

light and air to the soil. But the “bush” is never very far away. It

seems to be only waiting to close in again, and swallow up once more

what has been so laboriously cleared. West, east, north, and south,

the gum tree predominates, though the bush varies in the nature of its

undergrowth, which in the tropics becomes rich and beautiful.

The general effect of Australian landscape to English eyes produces an

impression of austerity. It is never friendly, perhaps because of the

general absence of water, the sombre wooded hills, the vast dun plains,

have something aloof and forbidding.

It would be difficult to find anything in life more stimulating and

delightful than the first walk in a new country, where every sight and

sound is unfamiliar. Strolling along the soft, hot sandy road that

first morning, past the low-verandahed houses, each with its wooden

palisade, its windmill and big grey water-tank, we came to rising

ground overlooking the Swan River. Behind were the low deep blue hills

of the Darling Range, and the broad river lay glassy in the heat of

the sun, blue as the Lake of Geneva on a summer’s day. Its wooded

banks run out in little spits of land with white sandy foreshores, one

or two small white-sailed boats were floating idly on it, and some

water-fowl swam on its unruffled surface. The foliage of the gums with

which its banks are covered is dark and uniform in colour, and had the

massive effect of our trees in autumn, before the leaves have begun to

turn. The air was heavy with the scent of some white-flowering shrub,

the stillness was unbroken except by the note of a magpie; the place

seemed a paradise. So it must have looked to the first settlers, the

first pioneers, who stood, as we stood, looking down on it. It left an

ineffaceable impression, and we never again saw anything more beautiful

than that view.

Western Australia is famous for its wild flowers. We were a month too

early, but even so we saw many strange and beautiful varieties. They

are more numerous here than anywhere else in the world, even now many

have not been classified. The most characteristic are as unlike as

possible to our delicate evanescent wild flowers at home; strongly

growing, determined, having adapted themselves, by becoming wiry or

leathery, to all exigencies of heat or drought. The banksia, for

instance, looked as if a fir-cone had suddenly burst into bristling

pink flowers; the hard cone of it is called by the natives a “mungite,”

and is used to kindle fire. Some unobservant person once told the West

Australians that their birds were all songless, their flowers all

scentless, and being naturally self-depreciatory, they have quoted it

ever since. The bird-notes are very beautiful and clear in quality of

tone; the note of the magpie will at once occur to the most casual

observer, to quote only one instance. Old Dampier, in 1699, on his

first landing in Western Australia was struck with “the small birds,

all singing with great variety of fine shrill notes.” He mentions too,

being observant, as befits an explorer, “the small flowers growing on

the ground, that were sweet and beautiful,” and where else is there a

better description of the eucalyptus “sweet-scented and reddish within

the bark,” and “with long narrow leaves ... on one side whitish and on

the other green.” But the “racoons” (kangaroos) which were so numerous

as to be easily caught, and were “very good meat,” are now but rarely

to be seen, where he first sighted them.

Cottesloe Beach, our headquarters while we were in Western Australia,

is a pleasant seaside suburb, with, as its name suggests, an immense

beach of finest white sand, lapped by smooth waters and protected by

Rottnest Island from ocean storms. The cliffs of Rottnest Island,

showing yellowish in the bright sunshine, with the white needle of

the lighthouse sharply defined are the first sight of land as ships

approach West Australia.

The half an hour’s railway journey to Perth runs through other little

garden suburbs, for all Australian towns straggle out for many miles

into the country, and cover a very large extent of ground. Space is

unlimited, and nobody’s domain large or small, need elbow that of his

neighbour. The little train on its narrow gauge railway rattles past

roads of one-storied houses, standing on their piles; each with its

verandah, and sloping iron roof, each surrounded by its palisaded

garden, with its purple kennedya, its pink geranium and wattle, each

with its inevitable tall grey iron water-tank; somewhere about there is

sure to be an array of the ubiquitous kerosene tin, utilised either as

a pail, a basket, a flower-box, or all three. We saw them used to form

chimneys, even to construct a raft. These suburbs have an air of having

loose ends left hanging out. It is all so new; there is no time to

attend to details when time is so essentially money. So bordering the

low fences are rough undergrowth and gum trees and banksias, and coarse

wiry grass--the beginning and the end of the bush.

CHAPTER III

PERTH: A PARADISE FOR THE WORKING MAN

The city of Perth is in a transition stage. Scattered over the low

hills of the Swan River, its situation is magnificent, and its climate

superb, but it is as yet only partly built, or rather it is undergoing

the gradual process of rebuilding. As the municipality becomes more

wealthy, handsome houses are replacing temporary structures, so that

imposing white official buildings alternate with makeshift affairs

hurriedly run up in earlier days, when need was urgent and money was

scarce. Perth is, then, on its way to becoming a fine town, and its

public buildings are being constructed from simple designs in good

taste.

[Illustration: PERTH, FROM “THE NARROWS.”]

But what most impresses the new-comer from Europe in Australian

towns is not the buildings, but the people. Here is no miserable

sordid fringe of the poor and wretched. In this happy country there

is no poverty. Its people are well fed, well clothed, well housed,

well-to-do. Whatever her problems, and they are many and difficult,

and not to be lightly pronounced upon by the casual visitor, it is the

glory of Australia that she has no poor.

It appeared to us, especially in the West, that a characteristic type

is developing; lean, loosely hung, wiry, with eyes deep-set from the

strong sunlight. In odd contrast to European towns, men everywhere

preponderate over women in the streets. Perhaps because of its newness,

the attitude of the other states to Western Australia is still a

little patronising. Western Australians themselves are fully conscious

of this, they on their part always talk about “the East” in tones of

desire: “I hope we shall go to the East next year,” is often heard in

Perth. At first we thought they meant China or Japan, but we soon found

that in Western Australia “the East” means Melbourne or Sydney. They

stand for London or Paris, and one lady said plaintively: “If I have a

nice dress, when I go to see my sister in ‘the East,’ she says, ‘You

didn’t get that made in Perth.’”

Perth, however, is looking forward. She knows the time will come

when she can compete fearlessly with her elder sister the capital of

“the East.” Meanwhile she has achieved the acquisition of the most

attractive zoological gardens of any Australian city. They are small,

but charmingly laid out, the animals left free to roam about in their

own little grassy paddocks. The pleasant shady walks are lined by the

pretty Cape lilac, which in July is bare of leaves, but covered with

clusters of yellow berries, very decorative in effect. These gardens

lie on the far side of the Swan River, and a ferry-boat plies across

its shining blue waters. Numbers of black and white water-fowl swim

alongside, diving below and bobbing up again, or settling on a row of

posts that run out from the shore, each one like a little black and

white carved ornament. The gardens are a few minutes’ walk from the

landing stage. We found them charming, the darker evergreens everywhere

lighted up by patches of golden wattle. The kangaroos and wallabies

feeding in their little enclosures hop up and put gentle inquiring

noses into your hand.

Perhaps it is because the little wild Australian animals are so

pathetically confiding that they are becoming extinct. The authorities

do all they can to preserve them, but it appears to be inevitable,

though deplorable, that the native wild animals of Australia, charming

little inoffensive creatures, are becoming rarer every year, in spite

of large reserves or national parks, where everything is left untouched

in its wild state. Unfortunately some of the most interesting cannot

be kept in captivity. This applies, for instance, so we were told,

to the koala, or little tree-bear, and to the curious duck-billed

platypus, a little animal covered with a wiry brown fur, with the bill

of a bird, and something of the habits of our river otter. The gardens

possessed a one-eyed alligator that caught pigeons in its mouth with

astonishing dexterity, and swallowed them whole in two gulps; and

some fascinating cranes with beautiful vermilion legs, that danced

as gracefully as any ballerina. Our own visit to the gardens was

pleasantly concluded by tea, which an Australian lady was hospitably

dispensing to ourselves and some other English visitors.

Tea is a most important feature of Australian life. Tea comes in with

the maid and hot water in the mornings, and tea is drunk at breakfast;

“Morning tea” is a settled social institution. We were invited to it

on several occasions, it is served at eleven o’clock. Tea next appears

at or after lunch. Afternoon tea is a matter of course everywhere;

but it comes in again at or after dinner, and is very often drunk the

last thing at night. One would think so much tea would undermine the

strongest constitution, but it is made very weak with a great deal of

milk. Australians themselves feel that their indulgence in tea-drinking

is rather excessive but they account for it by saying that “In the

bush you cannot get anything else to drink,” and neither seek nor offer

other explanation.

It was at this Perth tea-party that we first saw the brown heavily

scented “boronia,” for which West Australia is famous. The tables were

decorated with that and the delicate pink Geraldstown wax flower.

Boronia has a small chocolate-coloured flower, yellow inside, and is so

sweet that its scent is overpowering in a room or on a dinner table.

The genus was named after an Italian botanist. There are many varieties

in Australia, which, to the uninstructed eye, do not in the least

resemble each other. _Boronia megastigma_, the West Australian variety,

is used for the manufacture of scent, and is cultivated for sale; it is

one of the most characteristic spring flowers.

We were not long in discovering that Western Australia, whatever

course its future development may take, is at present a paradise for

the working-man. Nowhere else is life made so pleasant and easy for

him in such matters as housing and education; nowhere else are his

children given such facilities for making their way in the world in

their turn. To begin with, education is provided free of cost, from

the primary school to the University. In the primary schools boys are

given manual training, and girls are taught cooking and domestic

economy. Special facilities are provided by the Government to meet

the needs of scattered settlers in the bush remote from centres of

population; wherever it is possible to assure an average attendance of

even ten children within a radius of three miles, schools are already

established. The Education Act even takes into consideration the case

of isolated families, where the muster of children is less than ten;

the department pays £7 a year for each child on condition that the

parents find a suitable teacher, and will supplement this grant, so

that he may have a minimum of £30 a year over and above the cost of his

board and lodging.[2] In effect the Government pays part of the salary

of a private tutor. It can be easily imagined that the education grant

must be a very heavy one, in proportion to the population. It amounts,

in fact, to about £1 annually for every individual in the state.

From the primary schools children are drafted into the secondary

schools, when they are able to profit by the advanced standard of

teaching. There are also technical schools, where trades are taught,

and a training college for teachers.

We visited one of the intermediary schools, the Perth Modern School,

as it is called, at Leederville, a suburb between Perth and Cottesloe

Beach. We found a handsome red brick building, looking like a

Nonconformist college in one of our older Universities. In the large,

well-kept grounds there is room for football, tennis, hockey, and a

gymnasium is provided in a detached building.

The school is admirably constructed for its purpose, the classrooms

opening out of a large central hall. We were unexpected and

unannounced. In the course of our researches in pursuit of the

headmaster we were impressed with the excellent discipline and tone of

a school in which the children’s attention was not to be distracted by

the presence of strangers glancing into their classrooms in passing.

The teachers, masters, and mistresses, all wore university gowns.

The headmaster, alert and enthusiastic, showed us over his spacious,

airy school-buildings, including the well-equipped laboratory and the

department of domestic economy. Western Australia does not neglect the

practical side of its children’s education, and here the girls are

taught dressmaking, millinery, and cooking. The dining-rooms of the

staff, and those pupils whose homes are at a distance, had the air of

a well-appointed restaurant, with its small tables daintily set out

with clean linen, and fresh flowers brought by the children. We noticed

among them what looked like a small edelweiss, the Australian “flannel

flower.”

The period of education at these intermediate schools consists of a

four years’ course lasting from 12 to 16. A “Leaving Certificate”

on the completion of the four years’ course must be obtained by

examination to enable the student to pass into the University. Some

students are drafted into the Training College for Teachers, or, after

the four years’ course is finished, students may stay on at the school

to study special subjects. We were impressed with the appearance of the

children. They were healthy, well-to-do, and attractive; their manners

were frank and without self-consciousness.

One of the older girls, who was deputed by the headmaster to show us

the way to the station, would have compared favourably with any English

schoolgirl of the same age. Her father had visited England, “and

you have no _sand_ in England,” she added, half incredulously, “and

father could not make them understand about the sand here.” She came

from up-country, and was able to tell us that two handsome large grey

and black birds with a singularly limpid note were “rain birds.” She

also pointed out to us two large castor-oil trees, and told us that

the magpies, predatory, knowing-looking birds, which are to be seen

everywhere in Australia, are called “break o’ day boys” in the country,

because, like our cocks, they call the neighbourhood.

It is only quite recently that Western Australia has acquired its

University; it is in fact of such new foundation, that, like some

of Perth itself, it is still housed in temporary buildings. Its

professorial staff is appointed, and it confers degrees, but the

scene of its labours is at present in a number of classrooms beneath

a corrugated iron roof, opposite the charming gardens of Government

House--Australia is very good to its governors in the matter of houses

and gardens. But Perth is developing with great rapidity, and a

probable permanent site for the University is already talked of, on the

banks of the Swan River, in the National Reserve or King’s Park.[3]

If working-men are liberally treated by the state as regards education

for their children, they are treated no less generously as regards

housing accommodation.

One afternoon we visited, in company with the State Premier, some of

the houses the state builds for working-men. The bungalows were built

on the Western Australian plan on piles; one-storied verandahed houses

each in its own palisaded plot of ground about a quarter of an acre in

extent. Outhouses, including a washhouse, were at a little distance

from the main building. The houses were pretty and picturesque; they

were constructed of coloured “sand” bricks, made of cement and sand,

and had corrugated iron roofs. They vary in type, and the intending

purchaser can see the plans and make his own selection according to

his taste and means. Those we visited were situated on the pleasant

outskirts of Perth, with a view over the Swan River. We went over

several in the course of construction, and then made our way to a

street of occupied houses. We left the motor-car behind here, for the

roads were of soft sand like a sea beach. The sand was held together

by a low-growing plant, a kind of mesembryanthemum, locally known as

“pig’s face.” It has very thick, succulent leaves and an attractive

flower like a large primrose-coloured thistle. Sheep or cattle will

eat it, and it is almost independent of moisture. We visited some

new-comers who had lately taken one of the houses. The owner was a

member of the Legislative Council, and had recently left the goldfields

to come and live in Perth; for Western Australia holds that it pays

its legislators to legislate, and requires of them whole-hearted

devotion to the service of the state for their £300 a year salary. He

had already made his garden. The front lawn was sown with grass and

sanded over, and he was busied in making a vegetable garden in the

sand, in which early spring flowers were showing even then.

Inside, the rooms were large and well furnished, the bedrooms opening

on to the broad, shady verandah that faced what would eventually be the

lawn. As we drove away the Premier pointed out a small wooden house in

a tiny plot of ground--that, he said, is all a man can do without state

aid for the same money.

As to the financial part of the scheme, it is regulated on no principle

of extravagant philanthropy, but is conceived on a sound commercial

basis, to repay the Government the interest of 4½% on the capital

expended. The payments of the tenants are calculated on a basis of

5%, with a rebate of ½% on punctual payment. The land on which their

houses stand is inalienable, that is, at the end of ninety-nine years

it reverts to the state, and in the meantime the owner cannot dispose

of it except to the Government, who will take it back on a valuation,

allowing compensation on improvements, or making deductions from the

original cost on depreciations. To be eligible as a tenant a man’s

income must be under £400 a year, and he pays a small deposit. The

most expensive houses vary from £600 to £700. The tenant’s weekly

payments, which may be spread over a period of thirty years, eventually

make the house his own; but his payments may vary in accordance with

his means, and he can make his house his own at any point by paying

off the balance. No wonder that with such inducements to linger in

the neighbourhood of a town, men should shrink from the harder, more

vigorous life up-country. Yet it is “up-country” men that Australia

wants, to clear, sow, and till her rich, fertile soil; with enterprise

and energy to win certain fortune, and courage to face the initial

hardships and loneliness, which bring their own reward.

With all her natural advantages Western Australia’s development is

only a matter of the last twenty years. Like most of the rest of the

continent, she has an inhospitable and forbidding coast. The Dutch

knew of the existence of a southern land or, “Terra Australis,” before

the end of the sixteenth century, and Dutch captains sailing from the

Cape to Java and the East Indies not infrequently found themselves

within sight of a desolate and unknown coast, which they gradually

charted, till it was mapped in outline from the Gulf of Carpentaria to

Cape Leeuwin. It was not, however, till nearly the end of the century

that the first Englishman landed in Australia, when Captain Dampier,

commanding the “Roebuck,” navigated the western and north-western

coastline in 1699, and was not encouraged by what he saw there.

Sailing from the Downs in January with fifty men, and twenty months’

provisions, Dampier sighted the low, even shores of Australia in August

of the same year, and entered Shark’s Bay, as he called it. He and his

men went ashore, but sought in vain for water on that waterless coast,

digging wells, but to no purpose. A hundred years later, in 1803, the

continent was circumnavigated by Matthew Flinders, who suggested that

“Australia” should be substituted for the Dutch name of New Holland.

Still nearly another century passed away before Western Australia begun

to grow and prosper. In 1826 Major Lockyer was sent from Sydney, with

troops and a party of convicts, to occupy King George’s Sound on the

south coast, where the Port of Albany stands to-day, and a few years

later the Swan River Settlement was formed in the neighbourhood of

Fremantle and Perth; but these first beginnings of the colony were

unpropitious, and it languished till the discovery of gold brought the

first great influx of population, and with it the consequent demand

for agricultural produce, which at last gave an impetus to Western

Australian development.

Slowly the outside world began to realise the immense possibilities

of this great territory, which occupies about one-third of the whole

continent, and has an area eighteen times that of England and Wales.

Within its fertile and beautiful interior, stretching from the

temperate to tropical zones, were found districts well fitted for

raising cattle and sheep, for agriculture, and fruit-growing and the

cultivation of vines. Vast primeval forests of valuable timber cover

many square miles, while the discovery of coal and other minerals

accompanied that of gold. Western Australia is no less fortunate in

its climate than in its natural resources: over the greater part of

the state it is equable and pleasant without violent extremes. The dry

season lasts into April; the greater part of the rainfall, which varies

in different districts of the state from 40 to 10 inches, taking place

between May and September.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE BUSH

One great source of wealth to Western Australia are the karri forests,

covering thousands of square miles. Karri is a kind of eucalyptus

closely allied to the better-known jarrah, one of the hardest woods

in existence. It has been used at home to pave the streets of London.

In all but one respect karri is as good as jarrah, its only point of

inferiority is that it cannot be employed for underground purposes,

while jarrah can be left under water for twenty years without being any

the worse for it. Karri has to be specially prepared--“powellised” is

the technical term--and that is an expensive process. Otherwise it is

almost impossible to tell the two woods apart, except by the ash after

burning.

Western Australia asserts that its karri trees are the tallest in the

world, though Victorians make the same claim for the giant gums of

Gippsland. So far these Gippsland trees have been proved to be the

tallest in Australia. The official measurements are: height, 326 feet

1 inch; girth, 25 feet 7 inches; measured six feet from the ground.[4]

Their dimensions are surpassed by the Californian redwood, which have

been found attaining a height of 340 feet; but whatever the actual

measurements, the effect of the immense height of the Australian

trees is everywhere imposing enough to warrant competitive statements

concerning it.

Remote from all habitation, the difficulties in the way of felling

and transporting the karri are very great, and the Western Australian

Government have in consequence established some state sawmills about

two hundred miles up-country, in the heart of the primeval, uncleared

forest. It is the nucleus of a new township called Big Brook. Australia

has not shown herself altogether felicitous in her nomenclature, for

generally it is neither original nor descriptive, except where native

names have been adopted, which, if not euphonious, have a meaning.

We had the good fortune to be in Perth on the occasion of an official

visit organised by the Government. Australian trains always run at

night, and so avoid much tedium and loss of time. After an early

dinner, we started from Perth at 7.30 for Big Brook in a special train.

The line, like all Western Australian railways, was laid on a narrow

gauge, with the result that the carriages jolted and rocked like a

small boat in a storm. An odd little characteristic feature of West

Australian travelling is that at the end of each carriage is suspended

a canvas water-bag, with a cup attached to it. They are also seen

hanging in verandahs, impressing on the stranger that he is in a dry

and thirsty land, where water is always precious.

One of the advantages of the Western Australian climate is that

the nights are cool, though the spring sunshine was intensely hot.

Whoever organised this Government visit to the sawmills had a very

high standard of comfort, for from first to last it was most admirably

arranged. We were a small but very pleasant little party, and met and

talked in the friendly Australian way, in each other’s compartments.

About nine o’clock a light supper was brought round, and we soon after

went to bed and fitfully to sleep under a mountain of rugs. Whenever

the train stopped there was a loud chorus of frogs from unseen swamps.

We were called next morning by the conductor bringing us tea, and

later, while we were dressing, he came round with fruit. We woke to

find ourselves already in the depths of the forest among the soaring

white trunks of the karri, the early sun tinging their smooth trunks

with red. The line had been recently made, and the sleeping cars were

very heavy, so we proceeded slowly. There was very little sign of life;

we could almost feel the great deep silence of the forest, moist, and

fresh, and cold, in the frost of early morning, for it lies 400 feet

above the sea level, and the temperature was very different from that

of the dry sandy plains of Perth. At long intervals solitary wooden

houses stood in little clearings, with grave-eyed children before the

doorway, shading their eyes to watch the unfamiliar passage of a big

train. More seldom we came upon a scattered village of tents, roughly

put up like a gipsy encampment, pitched among the damp undergrowth.

There was something pathetic in the deep isolation of these pioneers,

though the near neighbourhood of the railway made their lives almost

metropolitan, compared with those of many Australian settlers.

As we drew nearer to our journey’s end, we passed an occasional small

clearing, where the yellow sandy soil had already been planted with

apple trees for the fruit growing, which is one of the industries

of the future for Western Australia; or patches of forest had been

ringbarked,[5] and left to die, after the cheap but wasteful method

of clearing in use. Visitors to Australia cannot help being impressed

with the waste of timber, which seems appalling to an inhabitant of

an over-populated northern country, where everything grows slowly,

and every inch of wood has its economic value. They are too ready to

rush into print, or public pronouncements, on a subject of which only

prolonged residence in the country, and a more than superficial study

of its economic problems, could enable them to judge. In the first

place the cost of transport is prohibitive, or means of transport may

even be non-existent; and secondly, in a new country time is money.

Great tracts of forest all over Australia are ringbarked and left to

rot. In the Government sawmills at Big Brook, the debris of the great

karri trees is lost. There is wholesale waste, wholesale destruction

of timber going on in Australia, the least intelligent observer

cannot fail to mark it, but time is literally money in Australia. “We

can’t afford to wait,” said one of the leading statesmen of Western

Australia, commenting on the waste of timber at Big Brook. “We

sacrifice five pounds to gain twenty,” said one of the shrewdest and

best-informed officials of Victoria.

By the common process of ringbarking, dead trees are left standing

over great areas of forest land, vast white skeleton armies, a strange

and desolate sight. If the land is to be used for arable purposes,

the trees have to be removed; but for pasture, when the trees are

dead, and can no longer deprive the grass of nourishment and moisture,

they remain standing for years, till in time with the process of

the seasons, and the attacks of insects, the hard wood decays and

crumbles away. Thus the destruction of forests goes on in order to

provide timber for building; for fencing, mining, fuel, as well as

for commercial purposes of export, or to improve, or create, arable

or pasture land. In Western Australia besides, green timber is cut

for fuel, in the neighbourhood of the goldfields, because of the

scarcity of coal, but natural reafforestation is usually allowed to

proceed. However, when all these necessities are admitted, there has

been a deplorable waste of timber, the want of which is already felt

in settled districts; and it is hoped that further wanton destruction

will be prevented, and replanting will be undertaken by all the states.

Official opinion is becoming alive to the importance of the question

to the future history of Australia. Victoria and New South Wales are

doing some planting, but South Australia is the only state in which

forest plantation is being carried on on a large scale.[6]

The railway ended abruptly in a large clearing in the forest about

fifteen miles from the coast and two hundred miles from Perth. The

air was that of a keen autumn morning, and we climbed down from our

carriages, for there was of course no platform, feeling stiff and

chilly, to find breakfast waiting for us in a big wooden hall, with a

great fire blazing in the kitchen, which opened out of it, the most

cheering and comfortable sight in the wilderness. These halls are a

feature of backwood settlements in Australia; they are utilised for

all social and business purposes, and are the common meeting ground of

the community. In this instance the landlord leased the building from

the state, and provided meals for the men employed in the sawmills.

He invited us to inspect his pleasant kitchen, the floor sanded with

sweet-smelling, deep-red sawdust. At the back he was putting up

bedrooms in small detached one-storied wooden buildings. Big Brook with

its keen, pure air, the sweet, clean scent of the fresh-sawn wood, and

all round, the illimitable forest, mysterious and impenetrable, would

be an ideal resting-place, if anyone in Australia were ever over-worked.

But meanwhile breakfast was waiting for us, a never-to-be-forgotten

breakfast of good coffee, hot rolls, porridge, new-laid eggs, and

chops the tenderest in the world, the product of the local sheep. Fig

jam, with which it concluded, was excellent. Figs grow readily in

Western Australia, and produce abundant crops of fruit. They were very

noticeable at this time of year, as they were the only deciduous tree.

After breakfast we visited the whole settlement, which of course was

built entirely of wood. In the school, in a bright, cheerful classroom,

a master was conducting the tiny classes of well-dressed, rosy-cheeked

children. Opposite the school was a billiard-room, where the men could

meet in the evenings; there was also a bank, and a post office. We were

impressed by the splendid physique of the men; they were as agile as

cats, muscular and supple; and these qualities were necessary, for the

work is very dangerous from the moment the axe is laid to the root of

the tree. The logs are of immense weight, they bound and crash down the

incline to the back of the mill, when they are unloaded from the truck,

and fly asunder with great force when they are sawn. The log, or trunk

of the tree is first sawn in two longitudinally, and is then again

cut into smaller and smaller slices, till it becomes planks. The saws

are graduated, becoming more and more fine. The task of keeping them

true is an accomplishment of great delicacy, it is one man’s work; he

corrects deviations in the metal with a hammer, judging them entirely

by eye.

In the neighbourhood of the sawmill all the air is filled with flying

sawdust, and the sweet scent of the freshly sawn wood. The dust falls

to the ground in deep red masses, the flying chips look like scraps

of raw meat, but the rich colour fades when they dry. The process of

preparing the karri wood for use is at present a very expensive one.

The planks have to be stewed in order to preserve them. They are put

for this purpose into immense tanks of molasses, and left seething

there to harden. It is hoped that scientific experiment may evolve

a less costly method. After going over the mills we were taken up a

little railway line into the forest to see a tree felled. We sat on

benches on trucks behind the engine, which carried a supply of wood

for its boiler, for the cost of bringing coal up to Big Brook would be

quite prohibitive. Even the boilers that work the mills are fed with

wood. The engine was run by a magnificent-looking old stoker with a

white beard and the air of a patriarch. When we scrambled off the

trucks on to the soft, rich earth of the forest, we had to wait to let

a bullock team go by, twenty-four of them pulling one log with a big

metal “shoe” on the end to prevent its digging into the ground. The

passage left a deep slide in the red earth. The bullocks are bound

together in twos by very uncomfortable-looking, heavy wooden yokes, and

their progress is punctuated by frightful yells and cracking of whips

from the drivers.

[Illustration: FELLING KARRI.]

We had not far to walk; the sun was now almost oppressively hot, and

the steamy atmosphere was full of the rich, moist smell of the damp

earth and the undergrowth. The woodcutters, who fell these immense

trees, are so skilled that they can gauge the exact spot on which they

will fall to within a few inches; such accuracy is a matter of life and

death in tree-felling. When we arrived on the scene the great trunk

of the karri was already sawn through by two men working on a kind of

little platform erected round it. For an instant the slim, white tree

tottered, while we held our breath, then it began to fall slowly, at

first with a crackling sound; finally it came crashing and tearing its

way among the neighbouring trees, followed by a shower of leaves; there

was a sound as of the firing of a big gun; all the earth trembled; it

seemed, as if the whole vast silence of the forest was shaken. A second

tree that we saw felled measured one hundred and fifty-eight feet to

the first fork.

The woodcutters are paid by the load that the bullocks draw, the bare

trunk of the tree when its branches have been lopped off. We were told

that they can make as much as £6 a week. The cost of living does not

amount to much more than 25s. a week for a single man, as he can board

sumptuously at the Hall for 22s., and the price of lodgings is about

1s. 6d. This leaves a considerable surplus, and in Big Brook there is

no means of spending money. In consequence, men occasionally go off to

the nearest town when they have amassed a small capital, and stay there

till it is all spent, and they have nothing to show for it. They work

eight hours a day, and everything is regulated by contract. They are of

various nationalities, but all of magnificent physique. While we were

waiting to remount our railway trucks, a team of forty-eight bullocks

passed, dragging one enormous log of twenty tons weight, the drivers

cracking their long whips, screaming and leaping into the air in a

frenzy of inarticulate excitement that somehow conveyed a meaning to

the bullocks. Soon after we began the return journey we passed through

a belt of jarrah, the still harder kind of eucalyptus that we had only

seen in the form of piles; the trunks were reddish instead of white

like the karri.

We saw also for the first time a common feature of the Western

Australian bush, the curious “Black Boys,” called in Queensland “grass

trees.” They look like a knotted dead trunk with bulrushes growing on

the top in thick bunches. Sometimes the trunk is forked, and there are

a pair of odd bushy heads on one black misshapen trunk.

The bush in this part of Australia has little diversity. The keen

air of the early morning had made us very hungry, in spite of so

substantial a breakfast, and we were not sorry to reach Jarraduck,

the settlement in the forest where lunch was waiting in another large

wooden hall. The long tables were decorated with masses of golden

wattle and purple kennedya. Lunches of this kind, and we sampled very

many, are always just alike, varying only with the resources of the

neighbourhoods,--lots of flowers and a warm welcome, plates of assorted

cold meats, of which turkey is an almost inevitable ingredient;

elaborate sweets, of which one is always an excellent trifle, and fruit

of the district, in this case the small, sweet, thick-skinned local

orange.

The refined-looking, sweet-faced landlady seemed inappropriate to

the rough surroundings. “We shall just stay here till we can better

ourselves,” she explained. A few more hours brought us out of the

forest, there were more clearings, homesteads became more frequent,

the red soil was freshly ploughed for oats, orchards began to take

the place of the eucalyptus, with apple trees not yet in blossom,

and orange and lemon trees covered with fruit. The country became

hilly, and half-castes were at work in the fields, shock-headed, and

unintelligent-looking. We had left the bush behind, and were now in the

region of an older settlement, the fruit-growing district of Western

Australia. Fruit-growing is becoming one of the most important factors

of Western Australian industry, and it is hoped that it will prove an

even greater source of prosperity, because a more permanent one, than

the gold that cannot last for ever. The climate, and much of the soil

in the South-West are admirably adapted for all kinds of fruit-growing.

The apples are excellent, so are the oranges, pears, plums, apricots,

and peaches, strawberries and gooseberries, all of which are grown

successfully. Fruit-growers, who have taken care in selecting a holding

where the soil and conditions are favourable for their crops, have not

long to wait before reaping their profits, as six-year-old apple trees

have been known to produce from £50 to £60 an acre. It is important

also to select a fruit for growing that will travel and keep. In 1913

there were still more than 88,000 acres suitable for the cultivation of

fruit or vine-growing, subdivided into convenient blocks and waiting

for selectors.

Bridgetown is the centre of the fruit-growing district of Western

Australia. Motor-cars were waiting to show us the neighbourhood,

and we started in the golden light of the late afternoon sun to see

something of the country. It was our first experience of Australian

motorists. To enjoy motoring in Australia one must have an adventurous

disposition. Except in the neighbourhood of large towns the roads are

very rough; indeed, the long droughts make it impossible that they

should be otherwise. The soft, dry soil crumbles away, the light dust

is stirred up by every passing vehicle, leaving deep ruts, so that the

same road is often on different levels, and a car runs along at a sharp

angle, with one wheel poised on the edge of a rut, and the other in a

hollow. Practised drivers achieve this difficult accomplishment with

much skill and the minimum of jolting, but even so, the car often takes

flying leaps. So we started on an apparently breakneck career, holding

tight on to the sides of the motor, and dashed up and down hills that

an English motorist would have hesitated to look at, red and rutty as

a Devonshire lane in winter. We never knew the name of that kindly

motorist, who so gallantly risked his own and our lives, not to mention

his machine, in showing us as much as possible of the surrounding

country before the light faded. He was one of the many, many unknown

friends who did us some passing kindness on our rapid journey, leaving

only a warm memory behind it. Hail and farewell to each and all of them!

The country-side was very beautiful, more English, and less

unfamiliar-looking, than anything we had yet seen, with steeply

undulating hills and valleys, springing young green crops, and

orchards, with apple trees whitened against some parasitical scab, or

oranges and lemons. The comfortable homesteads had a more finished

and abiding air than anything we had yet seen; for Bridgetown, as our

host explained to us, “is a very old settlement--sixty years old!” It

even possessed a tiny stone church, which gave it a pleasantly homely

and established air. We crossed the beautiful Blackwood river by a

picturesque wooden bridge where the river flows through a deep gorge

up which black and white wild duck were sailing. In the fading glow of

the sunset the country looked still more English, for the groups

of gum trees that crowned the hills were indistinguishable, and the

evening light seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of calm contentment over

the thriving country-side, as of a day’s work well done. We ran through

the little scattered township, to the Freemason’s Hotel, at which our

friend the motorist deposited us, and vanished into the dusk.

[Illustration: OXEN HARNESSED TO A LOG AT BIG BROOK.]

As we went in out of the darkness one of our fellow-travellers brought

us a specimen of the pretty, curious “kangaroo paw,” a flower that

looks as if it had been cut out of bright red and green moss, whose

buds take the exact shape of a kangaroo’s little foot. After dinner

we strolled along the broad, silent country road, leading out into

the deep stillness beyond, broken only by the barking of the village

dogs, and the croaking of unseen frogs. The men of the neighbourhood

loitered in the light of the shop windows, kindly looking and highly

curious. We met at Bridgetown a Government official at the head of the

Fruit-growing Department. He told us that this corner of South-Western

Australia, a district as large as the state of Victoria, was the finest

soil for fruit-growing in the whole state. The industry was of very

recent growth, the first trial shipment was only made ten years ago,

but since 1907 the trade had been established upon a commercial basis,

and the export of apples was greatly increasing every year in quantity.

Western Australia has also successfully exported grapes, but

unfortunately the manufacture of wine is now on the decline. A very

delicate and pleasant chablis is produced there. We tasted two kinds,

a pale, and a warmly coloured golden chablis. They compared favourably

with the light wines of Italy, and though like them, they would

probably lose all their character and flavour after being fortified for

export, they could be grown for home consumption. The explanation of

the decline given to us at Bridgetown was that since Federation, and

the abolition of inter-state customs, growers cannot afford to mature

their wines sufficiently to compete with the longer established trade

of the Eastern states. It is hoped that raisins and currants may be

produced, and the climate is also suitable for the growth of olives;

the evergreen trees would serve the further purpose of affording

shade for the cattle. Our return journey was made successfully and

uneventfully, and we slept soundly, only awaking occasionally, to find

ourselves being shot to and fro like shuttles in a spinning mill; and

arrived home to breakfast at Cottesloe Beach.

CHAPTER V

AGRICULTURE AND GOLD

It was the discovery of gold in West Australia that gave the first

real impetus to the development of the state. In the earlier half of

the nineteenth century the country was urgently in need of labour, and

from 1843 onwards was glad to supply the deficiency by the importation

of convicts. The convict system “assigned” people, as it was called,

to the settlers to live upon their property and perform compulsory

labour for them; the residue worked in “road gangs” or in Government

penal settlements. All the other states, as they grew and prospered,

began to resent the dumping on their shores of the least desirable

element of the population from home. As early as 1837 a Parliamentary

Committee was appointed to inquire into the whole question, both from

the point of view of the unhappy convicts and their Australian hosts,

and recommended that the practice should cease. It was, however, too

convenient a solution of a difficulty to be readily relinquished by

the home authorities. It continued in a modified form till the Eastern

states protested so vigorously and actively, that soon after 1848 the

home Government, not without reluctance, were obliged to limit the

importation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then

called, and Western Australia.

The fact that Western Australia was glad to utilise this forced labour,

and continued to do so, for many years later, provoked deep resentment

in the Eastern states; it was seriously suggested that Western

Australia should be boycotted by the other colonies. It was not till

1868 that transportation was finally abolished, and by that time the

colony was firmly established.

So far the most important product of Western Australia has been her

mineral wealth. As early as 1842 mining operations were begun with the

discovery of lead and copper. Minerals form three-fourths of the value

of all the exports by the state since 1900, and nearly a third of the

whole mineral produce of the continent from the same date. The chief

mineral has of course been gold. It was discovered in the north at

Kimberley in 1882, and the announcement of the discovery brought many

fortune seekers whose adventure ended in disappointment, for Kimberley

has not produced any startling results. The real history of mining

in Western Australia did not, however, begin till 1892. It was in the

early nineties that the gold rush took place to the mining centre of

Coolgardie, and it is the East Coolgardie goldfield which includes the

mining centre of Kalgoorlie, that has produced more than half of the

whole value of the mineral products of the state. The total produce was

calculated up to the end of 1912 at more than £113,000,000, and of this

total more than 54% was produced by the East Coolgardie goldfield.[7]

The principal part of it came from the famous group of mines which

form the “Golden Mile” at Kalgoorlie. Much has been written about

the goldfields of Western Australia, and the gold rush of the early

nineties. Now Coolgardie has burnt itself out, is a dead city, though

mining is still carried on at Kalgoorlie. When gold was discovered

there was no water within three hundred miles of Coolgardie, and an

engineer of rare gifts and indomitable enterprise, conceived a scheme

for conveying water from the hills round Perth the three hundred odd

miles through the intervening almost desert plains. His name was C. Y.

O’Connor, and he is also responsible for the artificially constructed

harbour at Fremantle.

He got his water from the Darling Range, the low wooded hills that

make such a charming background to the Swan River, utilising a stream

in the hills to form a great dam or weir. Mundaring Weir is one of

the sights of Perth, not merely as a triumph of engineering, but for

its beautiful scenery. We started early in the afternoon one hot day

on the pretty little journey up to the granite slopes of the Darling

Range. The intervening country is almost populous, and very busy. The

line runs through Midland Junction, where the rolling stock for Western

Australia is constructed, and past a blank stretch of brickfields. The

granite begins to crop out on the grassy slopes of the hills as the

train approaches Mundaring. The neighbourhood is very fertile, with

large vineyards, and groves of orange trees covered with fruit. The

river, which forms the weir, had the appearance of a large lake lying

between steep, wooded banks, in the hot afternoon sun. It was faintly

reminiscent of Coniston, except that a large area of the trees on the

distant hills had been ringbarked to increase the water supply. They

stood a melancholy sentinel company on the hills they had once clothed,

tossing twisted, white arms to Heaven in mute appeal. The air was heavy

with the scent of wattle flashing golden among the sombre grey of the

other trees. The distant rattle of frogs in some backwater below, and

the occasional sharp trill of a bird were the only sounds to break the

stillness. We descended the rocky bank to get a better view of the

great dam. Its concrete walls are so sloped that the falling water does

not leave them at any point, and so an impact that would wear out the

wall is avoided.

In the course of its construction a large fissure was discovered in the

bed of the river, which had to be filled in with cement. We visited

the power-house, where the great pumps are busy day and night sending

water to the goldfields. It took eleven days from the time the first

trickle of water left Mundaring Weir for it to reach Coolgardie.

While the work was nearing its completion, its successful achievement

seemed incredible to the outside world. Unfortunately the inventor of

this great experiment, Mr. C. Y. O’Connor, died just too soon to know

that the water from Mundaring Weir had covered the three hundred odd

miles to the goldfields. A statue of Western Australia’s famous state

engineer stands on a hill above the scene of his greatest achievement.

The execution of this scheme, as well as that of the harbour at

Fremantle, were largely due to the influence and interest of Sir John

Forrest, first Premier of Western Australia, to whose enlightened

views and active patriotism the state has owed much.

We had tea at a hotel, whose verandah overlooked woods falling steeply

away at the back. It was a charming little place, and we should have

liked to stay there, forgetting that in Australia there is no soft,

lingering twilight, but dusk follows immediately, darkness very

swiftly, on the setting of the sun. Sometimes there is an afterglow,

a luminous orange light suffuses the darkness, and the heavy masses

of gum trees stand out inky black on the horizon. Such an afterglow

illuminated our return journey from Mundaring Weir to Perth.

Apart from its natural beauty and engineering achievement, Mundaring

Weir, or at least its neighbourhood, has a peculiar interest for the

zoologist. It is the home of a certain little black animal. To the

uninitiated its appearance is something between that of a small black

slug and a caterpillar, but to the scientific man it is of paramount

importance, because its legs are not real legs. Peripatus is its name,

and it lives under stones. Only recently, however, the secluded and

innocent life of the unfortunate peripatus has been rudely interrupted,

and he was in fact well-nigh exterminated by the visit to Perth of a

learned society all in search of specimens. So that henceforth the

peripatus will be more esteemed than ever in the scientific world.

We said it was the gold rush that created, or at least accelerated

the agricultural development of Western Australia. The influx of

population, with the direct aim of gold-digging, brought in its train

a dependent and attendant crowd of settlers to minister to its needs

by the provision of agricultural produce, meat, flour, butter, and

vegetables. Moreover, many of those who had come out to seek gold in

the mines, sought it instead in the fruits of the earth, in grain, and

in hay, in fruit and corn-growing. In the extreme north, known as the

Kimberley country, cattle are raised; south of that, in the south-west

pastoral district, sheep are the principal stock. The wheat belt, as

it is called, is a strip of country stretching about five hundred

miles from the Murchison River in the north, to the south coast east

of Albany. But the limits of the wheat-growing area cannot at present

be defined, the riverless districts of Australia are not desert in the

sense that the Sahara is a desert; strips throughout the so-called

desert are pastoral country on which grass will grow, supporting a

more or less sparse vegetation. After rain the desert is clothed with

vegetation, and the permanent plants depend on small local supplies of

subterranean water. But there is besides a vast artesian storage. These

so-called desert areas are shrinking every year, and the “wheat-line”

is encroaching upon and absorbing them as improved methods of

agriculture prevail. Thus at present farmers “are getting remunerative

crops from regions of low rainfall and light sandy soil, which would

have been looked upon as chimerical a decade ago.”[8]

The land laws in Western Australia are framed on easy terms for the

settler. The holdings are limited to two thousand acres of agricultural

land, including a homestead farm, or the equivalent of five thousand

acres in grazing land, but the husband or wife of the holder may select

an additional thousand acres of agricultural land, or two thousand

five hundred acres of grazing land. A homestead farm of 160 acres can

be taken up by new settlers on payment of about £9 in fees, with an

additional 30s. for a Crown grant at the end of seven years. Larger

grants may be had at from 10s. an acre, payable in twenty years without

interest. Certain conditions attach to land purchase. The holder of a

homestead farm of 160 acres, for instance, must reside there for six

months in each of the first five years; he must expend four shillings

an acre within the first two years, and a total of fourteen

shillings an acre in seven years, of which total only £30 is allowed

to be deducted in value for the cost of his house. Half the land must

be fenced within five years, the whole within seven years. One hundred

to a thousand acres of “Conditional Purchase Land,” at from 10s. an

acre, may be taken up. It is paid for in forty half-yearly instalments,

which, during the first three years, need not exceed 3d. an acre.

Conditions of residence, relating to improvements and fencing are, of

course, attached to these holdings. Conditional purchase by direct

payment is made on equally easy terms.

[Illustration: ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD AT BRIDGETOWN.]

We spent a Sunday in Perth, which was devoted partly to attending

the cathedral service, and partly to visiting a native compound

some distance away. Perth appeared to be a church-going place,

and its people, Prayer Book in hand, and in their Sunday clothes,

were setting off to their various places of worship, of which the

neighbourhood affords a great variety. The service in the cathedral

was well attended, and was conducted with that dignified simplicity

characteristic of the best traditions of English church worship; and

the familiar words of the liturgy seemed more deeply filled with

meaning in this far-off country. The singing of the choir was an

admirable performance, and would compare favourably with that of most

English churches.

After the service we were to lunch with the State Premier, and his

car was waiting for us. The chauffeur was not the uniformed and

correct personage, who drives our cars at home, but, as befits a

democratic country, a genial and friendly soul, who having bade us

welcome to the car, whirled us up to Mount Lawley, throwing occasional

information at us over his shoulder. Mount Lawley is a pleasant suburb

of Perth, if one can talk of suburbs where all is suburban; it lies

upon the slopes of the Swan River, and commands an inspiriting view

of the city, spreading out far and wide over its hills in vigorous

new growth. This Australian household in which we were guests had a

charmingly patriarchal atmosphere, for three generations sat at table:

a delightful, picturesque old couple, who had come out to Australia in

those hard and grinding early days, before a colonist had his bread

buttered, and his house built for him immediately on his arrival.

It was on this occasion that we saw for the first time those

formidable, but insignificant-looking Australian pests, the white

ant. We had gone out to see our host’s collection of wallabies,

large, brown, rat-like creatures, with the hind legs of a rabbit,

and we expressed a wish to see also the insect that could eat

everything except iron and jarrah wood. Australians cannot bear to

disappoint a guest. They would regard it as a breach of hospitality,

and an exhaustive search was made at once, till some white ants were

discovered under a wooden tub of plants--tiny white specks hurrying

away from the light.

The road to the Native Compound, for which we started after lunch, led

through the King’s Park or Government Reserve. Near all large townships

the Government has wisely set apart a tract of country to remain public

property. These are not parks in our sense of the word, for they are

not laid out in trim lawns and flowerbeds, or at least only a small

fraction of them; but the bush is left in its wild state, a sanctuary

for birds and animals. In the King’s Park red carriage drives lead

through the bush, at one point giving place to lawns and flowering

trees, and commanding a fine view of the Swan River and of Perth,

whose extent we for the first time realised. We were impressed by the

prosperous air of the crowds, whom the fine warm Sunday afternoon had

brought out; there were none among them who did not look well-to-do.

But our afternoon was only beginning. The Native Compound lay in the

direction of Guildford, a village about ten miles off, a settlement

of some antiquity compared to Perth. The way out into the country was

crowded with innumerable buggies taking whole families for an airing,

and a haze of red dust hung over the road.

We passed the race-course, as indispensable to an Australian town

as the post office, and the football ground, where we paused for a

moment to look on at a vigorous match between “the jockeys” and the

“bread-carriers.” Farther on people were playing on a newly laid-out

golf-course, driving off from tees on which the unfailing kerosene

tin did duty for sand-boxes, though one would hardly have thought

it necessary to collect sand in boxes in Western Australia. Turning

up a narrow, muddy road, we passed a lot of small nursery gardens,

“Chinamen’s gardens,” with the Chinamen busy in them, but the activity

of the Chinaman in Australia is hardly more popular than that of the

white ant. We ploughed and splashed our ways along this side track, for

the road was not made, till it ended abruptly in a gate. Now inured to

the methods of the Australian motorist, we almost expected the car to

take the gate in its stride, but having opened it, we ran up the side

of a grassy bank on to a sort of plateau, girdled by the bush, with

what looked like a very low-class gipsy encampment in one corner,

not aristocratic gipsies with vans, but dirty little round tents

like those that were formerly dotted about the banks of the Thames,

near London, in haymaking time, but which have vanished before a too

inquisitorial County Council.

[Illustration: THE PREMIER OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.]

This was the native camp we had come to see; it had been a

camping-ground for the blacks from time immemorial, and the present

owner of the estate leaves it free to those, whose camping-ground was

formerly the whole vast continent. There are not very many natives

in Australia now; it is supposed by some that they were never very

numerous, that the struggle for existence on those arid plains and

waterless hills was too severe for these hardy nomads. Be that as

it may, they are dwindling, and in contact with the whites they

lose the primitive virtues they possess. The natives we saw at the

camping-ground near Perth certainly did not appear to have primitive,

or any other virtues. They were, it is true, principally half-breeds,

and whether regarded from the physiological or moral point of view,

they were a depressing spectacle. They were provided with Government

blankets, instead of kangaroo skins, and some form of a mission was

singing hymns for their edification; but both men and women were a

miserable, degenerate, apathetic looking crew. They talked English

with a cockney accent. The strange mob of yapping, small dogs of

indistinguishable breeds were the only thing that evinced much vitality.

There were, however, among them a few full-blooded blacks. One of

these, a shrewd-looking old woman with a grizzled mop of hair, told

us that when she was a baby, “the white people took me, but I lay

in the wood and listened to my people talking till I learnt their

language; then I ran away and went back to them.” We were anxious for

an exhibition of throwing the boomerang, or “kyle,” as they call it,

that curved stick, which, apparently missing its aim, describes an arc

and returns to the hand that threw it. The half-castes have lost the

art both of throwing and carving the kyle, and are too indolent to

achieve either, but an old native stepped out from among them to show

us how it was done. He had thick black hair, and his bright dark eyes

gleamed in his flat, glistening, ebony face. It was very curious to

watch him standing there turning his head about, sniffing and feeling

the direction of the wind, and at last he threw the kyle, spinning,

circling, returning, many times, while we watched him fascinated, and

the motley crowd of half-breeds looked on too at the art they had no

skill to practise. They have even lost the art of making fire with

the hard fruit of the banksia, “mungite” is the native name for it.

“Never go before a black,” they say in Western Australia; they can’t

be trusted, apparently, not so much from their malevolence as a sort

of light-hearted instinct of destruction. For instance, seeing a man

standing by the wall of a small shed at a little distance from the

camp, one of the blacks playfully let fly at him with a boomerang. He

fortunately missed the man’s leg, but made a hole in the building.

We left the camp, for there appeared a pretty little English girl,

who, having heard that there were visitors to the compound, had been

sent by her mother to ask them to tea in the hospitable Australian

fashion; so following a grassy track, we came to our great surprise

upon a dignified old country house on a wooded promontory overlooking

a higher reach of the Swan River. The owners of this beautiful estate

belonged to one of the “Seven Families” of Western Australia; that is,

they were descended from Australian grandparents on both sides. In

Australia one says, “My grandmother came over in 1830,” as we should

say in England, we came over with the Conqueror; for 1830 is in the

West, at all events, the beginning of Australian civilised history,

and those early settlers had a heroic struggle, and had to face every

sort of hardship, hunger, and the want of any kind of comfort, in a

way that settlers of to-day, even those who venture upon the strenuous

life of the backwoods, can never experience. The details of the lives

of these pioneers would form an extraordinarily interesting chapter in

Australian history, and, as was the fashion at that time, they beguiled

their loneliness with keeping diaries, a most valuable fashion to the

historian, for even the dullest chronicler unconsciously throws light

on manners and customs of the day, commonplaces to him, that the next

generation has forgotten. But invaluable as these old diaries would be,

they have unfortunately been in most cases destroyed.

Our hostess told us regretfully of several instances she had known of

this being done by very old people. They were very small communities

in those days, the life was rough and wild, and there was no public

opinion to control it, and, for that very reason, these intimate

records would have been all the more valuable and curious. As we sat

at tea in the charming drawing-room, with something of an old-world

atmosphere, somebody commented to our hostess on the extremely

difficult approach. Yes, she said, matter-of-factly, I prefer to have

no road to the house, it keeps “sundowners” away. The sundowner is

the Australian tramp; he arrives at nightfall and demands food and

lodging; if he does not get it, the householder pays the penalty in

missing poultry, or burnt ricks. Of course he only extorts this toll

in lonely places; but what a delightful career for a man of indolent

habits, and sufficient obtuseness of feeling, to wander through that

beautiful country, where the sun always seems to shine, sure, if not of

a welcome, of supper, bed, and breakfast, where he would.

The golden light of the setting sun was flooding the river and the

wooded hills, when we came away, our host and hostess pointing out to

us sadly a noble English oak tree on their lawn, that the white ants

had riddled through and through, reducing it to touchwood. We hurried

back, entering once more, as we neared Perth among a crowd of returning

cars, buggies, and bicycles, a haze of its soft red dust, while from

its hills the city itself was wrapped in a mysterious dull grey

twilight.

On one of our last days at Perth we paid a visit to the Parliament

House. Only the back is finished, and is impressive in its simplicity

of white freestone columns. The designs for the front are very

effective, the interior simple and well proportioned. While as for the

Upper House it is as luxurious as the council chamber of a medieval

Dutch town hall. We observe in passing that they provide remarkably

agreeable hot buttered toast there.

Our host on this occasion was an ex-Minister of Education, from whom

we learned many interesting facts about the social and economic

development of Western Australia. He was especially enthusiastic on the

importance and good results of cadet training, which he had done much

to promote. In the case of schoolboys of twelve to fourteen years old

it consists mainly of physical training calculated to produce better

development. This training carried out by the school teachers is given

for not less than fifteen minutes a day, the boys learn marching,

drill, and either first aid, swimming, or miniature rifle-shooting.

Teachers are trained for the purpose of giving this special education

in Government Schools of Instruction, where certificates of proficiency

are conferred; but the whole subject of the complete and admirable

system of Australian military training is dealt with in another chapter.

Soon after our arrival we were overtaken by rumours of European war,

almost incredible, except that Europe seemed so remote. Then came the

news that Germany had declared war on Russia and France. Great Britain,

it was said, would stand aloof. Even so the news was sufficiently

serious, and telegrams on the Perth post office were eagerly scanned.

It was not till quite the end of our visit that definite intelligence

arrived that England had joined the cause of the Allies, and even then

nobody realised it in the least.

Our last day came all too soon, warm and sunny, when we made the short

journey from Cottesloe Beach to Fremantle. The war news seemed more

real, when we saw a German tramp held up in the harbour, with the guns

of the forts trained on her. The big Orient liner was lying alongside,

and we boarded her with many regrets at what we were leaving behind,

for we had to say good-bye to many friends, and our cabin was filled

with flowers, sweet violets, and the heavy scented boronia, of which

Western Australia is so proud. At last we started on the four days’

voyage to Adelaide, and it was not till we reached Northern Queensland

that we again encountered that atmosphere of primitive freshness and

novelty, that we were leaving behind. So we left Western Australia,

with its warm-hearted, generous people, its vast, almost untouched

resources of primeval forest, and rich soil, its social problems,

on which the visitor is incompetent to pronounce, problems acute in

the old world, making themselves felt even here, especially that

seemingly irreconcilable one of the interests of the Labour man and the

Liberal. Irreconcilable so it seemed to us, for the Labour man may be

clear-sighted, but he cannot afford to be far-sighted, because, as he

himself would put it, he can’t afford to wait.

PART II

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER VI

A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

In a poem written long ago by Bret Harte the opening of the Pacific

Railroad which joined East to West was commemorated in an imagined

dialogue between the engines that met midway on the track.

What was it the Engines said,

Pilots touching--head to head,

Facing on the single track,

Half a world behind each back?

This is what the Engines said

Unreported and unread.

Then Bret Harte went on to record the puffing phrases in which each

engine described what it brought from the land of its base: the engine

from the East, speaking of the shores where the Atlantic beats, and

the broad lands of forest and of prairie; and the engine from the West

rejoining that it brought to the meeting the storied East:--

All the Orient, all Cathay

Find through me the shortest way.

That parable will find a new application (will have found, perhaps,

we should say) in the meeting of the engines on the track which is

to join Western Australia to South Australia, Perth and Albany to

Adelaide. One might speculate on what the engine from the West would

say on this occasion. It might breathe a few words of the Orient, and

would be entitled to add others concerning Afric’s sunwashed lands,

for it is not to be denied that the bulk of the liners coming through

Suez, and all those from the Cape, make West Australia their headland.

But East Australia touches Cathay more nearly both in climate and in

steamer connections, and a day will dawn when the construction of yet

another railway from Port Darwin in the Northern Territory will make

that port the nearest to Europe; and there are yet other projects

for joining Australia in shorter and shorter links to Panama and San

Francisco. So perhaps the engines will call a truce over their claims

on the older East and West, and will confine them to that newer West

and fast-developing East which the Australian continent provides within

itself.

The engine from the West, if it were of a philosophic turn might say

that the land it came from was of immemorial age, a relic of the

world before the Deluge; that its strange flowers, its bush coming as

close to its towns and settlements as grass to the trees on a lawn,

were older than mankind, and if by some accident of social progress

its towns and villages were swept away, then in a few years Western

Australia would slip back through time till it became again a strip

of the earth as the earth was when first the mammals began to appear

on its surface. Western Australia is as old as that; and he who looks

on it now with any spark of imagination cannot but be thrilled at the

vision afforded him of the planet as it was millions of years ago. No

tropical country, perhaps no country at all which men inhabit, except

Patagonia, conveys this impression of the unaltered primeval world.

But one could hardly expect a locomotive, a thing of steel and steam,

to dwell on this aspect of the land of its adoption. Rather would it

say that in Western Australia you could see at its earliest and best,

man the pioneer, making for himself a clearing, a home, a community in

the wild, blazing out the trails, watering the desert, laying a toll

upon the elements. Here he had built a town growing like a city of

enchantment in the bush; here he had found gold in the wilderness; and

here--you could see him at the beginning--he was carving wheat-lands

and orchards from the forest. Now, lastly, he was going to bring his

fields and forests and the harvest of his untapped sea-board by rail to

the markets of the East.

The locomotive from the East, with puffs which politeness had hitherto

repressed, would yield the point about antiquity in order to show that

in the more modern period the East had done very well with its time. On

the progress of Melbourne and Sydney it would not enlarge; suffice it

to point out the advantages of Adelaide.

It lies between the hills and the sea, a trap for sunbeams; a garden

city sweet with almond blossom in spring, tree-shaded in summer. A

girdle of parks is about its comely waist, and beyond them lie suburbs,

where the houses all have room to breathe. In the towns of the old

world the houses are on the top of one another, and the people too. In

Adelaide expansion takes place laterally, stretching out always to the

encircling range of hills; and the houses are one-storied. The city is

linked with its suburbs by radiating tramlines; and here one may pause

to interpolate an anecdote. Some years ago, when the writer was in

Naples, he was journeying by one of the trams which runs round the rim

of Naples’ incomparable bay. On the garden seat in front of him were

two Americans, who looked with him at the lovely vision, and said one

of them: “Well, I’ve been most everywhere, and seen most everything,

but I’ve never seen anything to compare with----” The writer leaned

forward to catch the anticipated eulogy on the view. “But,” concluded

the American lady, “I’ve never seen anything to compare with our car

service at Seattle!”

That is what the locomotive from the East would say about the car

service at Adelaide, which links up the spreading homesteads of the

periphery with the nucleus of handsome buildings, official, municipal,

educational, commercial, at the centre of the city. Adelaide is a

city within a park, surrounded by a garden suburb, and that is as

good a definition as one can find of it. It is handsome within its

city limits, taking a pride in its big buildings, the University

standing among lawns, its handsome private houses, its broad streets,

its general air of competence; but outside them, beyond the parks,

one would rather call it charming. The motor-car is bringing its

changes to Adelaide as to other places in the world. Just as in

London a generation ago the merchants and the well-to-do City men

built big houses at Streatham and Dulwich, but now are moving out to

Ascot or Sunningdale, so in Adelaide the prosperous are now building

towards Mount Lofty and the hills--though the gradients here are

trying even to the hard-driven Australian motor-car. The fringe of

suburbs is therefore occupied by what in England we should call

the professional classes, though no such conventions segregate the

trading, the commercial, the professional classes in the same way as

in the home country. But Adelaide is in one respect different from

other Australian cities. It has more nearly a professional class--or

may we say a professorial class?--than Perth or Melbourne, or Sydney,

or Brisbane. An English journalist once tried to express it by saying

that Adelaide represented “culture” in the Commonwealth; but that is

unkind both to Adelaide and the Commonwealth, for the soil of Australia

is unfavourable to the growth of culture or any other pretences. But

Adelaide has a large population in its trim bungalows of the suburbs,

interested in university work, in education, in social and democratic

problems, in art, in literature. It has the most eclectic collection of

pictures of any of the states; and here perhaps one may tell another

story. In the year before the War there was an outbreak of allegorical

canvases on the walls of the New English Art Club where a return to

primitive methods of expression in paint reflected the activities

of Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Futurism which permeated the

studios of Europe. Among others who had a hack at allegory was that

most capable of the younger school of painters, Mr. W. Orpen, and he

produced a representation of “The Board of Irish Agriculture sowing

the Seeds of Progress in Ireland.” It was a picture which was full of

remarkably fine drawing, as one might expect from one of the best two

draughtsmen in Britain, and the nude figure of the lady distributing

seed (on the left of the canvas), as well as the two naked babies in

the middle, and the black-clothed missioner on the right, were all

admirable. But what did it mean? Most English critics were silent on

this point, and nobody seems to have troubled Mr. Orpen to explain

himself, for, as Wilde wrote to Whistler, “to be great is to be

misunderstood.” However, the picture was bought for the Adelaide Art

Gallery, which is rightly anxious to collect work of the younger

artists, and made no mistake in choosing Mr. Orpen as one of the most

brilliant among them.

When, however, the picture was hung at Adelaide, the people gasped.

Then they wrote to the newspapers. Then artists wrote to the

newspapers. Some of them sympathised with the public bewilderment.

One of them, the best of Australian water-colourists, bludgeoned the

public for their ignorance in not appreciating the colour and drawing

of the masterpiece; but he did not insult the picture by saying what

it meant, and that was what the public wanted to know.... Probably

the discussion would be going on yet, but the War put an end to it,

and the picture in 1915 still adorned the Art Gallery; and we hope

it may continue to do so, though it was rumoured that Mr. Orpen had

offered to substitute something less recondite. However, this anecdote

will perhaps illustrate the vividness of the interest which Adelaide

takes in artistic and intellectual movements. It is an interest which

may be perceived in its active University, a University that has

contributed several first-class men to English Universities, and is

no less perceptible in its society which reproduces very closely the

social atmosphere of an English University town such as Cambridge. The

resemblance becomes closer still if the comparison is made between

Adelaide’s flowering and tree-shaded suburbs and the residential

environs which stretch away from the University town at home.

Such is Adelaide. Beyond and outside it, and on the farther side of the

tree-covered barrier of hills is rural South Australia, which, if one

were to indicate on a map, one might shade off to the northward as the

population grew less dense and the region of widely separated sheep

stations became more prevalent. As the herbage grows more scanty and

the water supply more precarious, the sheep stations themselves become

larger and fewer, till they give place to desert. Perhaps the greatest

surprise to a European visitor is the kind of land which in the more

distant stations, where the rainfall sinks very close to the margin of

double figures per annum, is called pasture land. It is khaki-coloured

and scanty, and one would imagine that only a persevering sheep could

find anything on it to eat. Industry is certainly demanded of the

sheep, for the phrase of three acres and a cow is altered in Australia

to five acres to a sheep. When the rainfall sinks the sheep has still

farther to travel for its daily meal; when it fails, the back block

sheep farmers see their sheep die by the thousand and ruin approaching.

Nowhere does the rainfall become a factor that can be neglected, and

South Australia was suffering from drought in the year 1914, when

we visited the state; but though the extremity of scarcity had not

been reached, there seemed to eyes accustomed to English well-watered

pastures, hardly any water at all. From the summit of Mount Lofty,

whence one could so easily see the vast shield of the sea, there were

also pointed out to us nearer patches of water shining like dull steel

in the hollows of low hills. These were the reservoirs, basins filled

by streams which we called brooks. These storage reservoirs are the

device which South Australia is developing to counteract drought; and

we visited a new one in course of construction among the hills to the

north-west of Adelaide.

That was the day on which we visited Mr. Murray’s sheep farm, a mere

trifle of forty miles from Adelaide. Before leaving the subject of

the reservoir, which was interesting from the engineering design of

its dam, then being thrown across the gap of two hills--a difficult

and masterly piece of work--one may give some idea of the size of the

basin by remarking that Mr. Murray, who lived some ten miles away,

had protested against the first plans. The reason was that when the

reservoir became filled it would have come flooding up to his front

door. A very pleasant front door it was too, belonging to something

that was part manor-house, part farm, and the counterpart of which

might have been found in many an English county. A long, low house with

windows meant to shade large, cool rooms, a wide hall, with pictures

and polo sticks and photographs--photographs of famous sheep--and a

side table gleaming with silver--the cups won as prizes. In front of

the house roses and flowering borders and a lawn--on it playing a

collie and a tame kangaroo. Beyond, the orchard garden. And not a sheep

in sight.

Far better as a picture, our host and his tall sons on the stone steps

to welcome us; and in the pretty drawing-room--the drawing-room of a

Victorian house at home--the hostess and her daughter. You might see

them both any summer’s day at Hurlingham, or Henley, or at Lord’s when

the Oxford and Cambridge match is being played.

However, our purpose was to see sheep. Could this be a sheep farm?

Where were the countless thousands which ought to have filled the

landscape--as they do in the photographs? We had driven over rolling

downs of short grass, through clearings of trees, and by tracks which

made the car leap like a tiger as it cleared the ruts, but where were

the sheep? We had seen other things that filled us with delight, a

flock of wild cockatoos--and though that may seem nothing to you who

read, let us add that there is an inexplicable thrill in seeing wild

anything that one has never before beheld except captive. There were

flocks of green and red and blue parrots too, and the laughing jackass

perched on the tree-stumps. But about the sheep?

They are there; no doubt about that. An Anglo-Australian whom we

know at home once confessed to us that the only blot on life in that

southern continent of free air and sunshine was that there was too

much sheep in the sheep-rearing districts--there was nothing else to

talk about. And at this point we recall an anecdote told to us by Dr.

E. S. Cunningham, the editor of “The Melbourne Argus.” There was a

Colonial Conference in England some years ago, and he and some of the

others who came to it, Mr. Deakin among them, went back to Australia

across the United States. One night in the Far West their train was

held up by accident, and they stopped at the hotel of some wayside

station. After supper, as they sat round the red-hot stove of the

hotel parlour, some of the citizens of the township blew in for their

evening conversazione, and hailed the opportunity of conversation with

strangers.

They quickly found that the strangers were Australians, and as quickly

turned the conversation on to the comparative advantages of the two

continents.

“I suppose now,” said one of them, “that you reckon to have a few sheep

in your country. We have sheep here too. Some. Now what size holdings

do you put up down there?”

Mr. Deakin, to whom the question was addressed, paused reflectively

and said: “Well, I don’t know that I’m well posted about sheep; but I

believe my friend has some knowledge of the subject. Cunningham, what

was the size of that farm that Colonel Burns got rid of last autumn?”

“I can’t quite tell you the size,” said Dr. Cunningham, after assumed

cogitation. “It was pretty big. There were about a quarter of a million

sheep with it.”

The American looked from one to the other, and expectorated at the

stove in a discontented manner. After a minute or two he started in

again.

“We get a good figure for our stock hereabouts,” he observed; “we breed

for quality. I guess wool is your strong suit. Now what about is your

figure per sheep over there?”

Again Deakin referred to Cunningham, the authority.

“What was it Murray of Adelaide was asking for that merino ram of his,

Cunningham--it was called Lion II, I believe?”

“I don’t know what he was asking,” returned Cunningham swiftly, “but I

can tell you what he got for it. He took eleven hundred guineas.”

The American looked from one to the other and swallowed hard.

“Thunder!” he said. “Give me cattle!”

* * * * *

Well, we didn’t see the quarter of a million sheep, and Mr. Murray’s

thousand-guinea ram lives only in portraiture in the hall of his

farm; but we did see some of the famous herd of which Lion II was

the congener. They had been rounded up for us, about fifty of them,

in one of the shearing yards; and most attractive animals they were.

Their thick merino fleece was about five inches deep, like soft fibre,

and their thick necks were in folds--concertina folds, as they are

called. They have been bred to this type, and their peculiar scientific

interest is the information which they afford to the explorers of

Mendelian principles of the permanence of the so-called “factors of

heredity.” But to the practical stock-breeder their immediate interest

is the vast amount of wool they yield. Mr. Murray said (if memory is

not at fault) that they each yielded about fifteen pounds’ weight of

wool at a shearing.

Of course the reason why we saw so few sheep is that, though this was

a comparatively small holding of very good pasture, and the sheep on

it are all, in a sense, specimen sheep, yet here, as elsewhere, the

thousands of the flock are spread over a very wide area of pasturage.

It is only at the shearing season that the sheep would be brought

together in great numbers. These occasions, and the life on sheep

farms--especially in the back blocks, where the life is wilder, the

herbage scanty, the seasons precarious--are interesting enough, though

here we cannot dwell on them. What does remain as the recollection of

Mr. Murray’s sheep farm is that of a hospitality and a generosity which

are so natural that they are never ostentatious, but which, long after

the day and hour have gone, warm the heart with the memory of them.

CHAPTER VII

ADELAIDE

We had been warned to expect cold and rough weather, if anywhere, in

the great Australian Bight, but like everything we had ever been told

about Australian weather, the prophecy was fallacious. The Tuesday in

August on which we sailed from Fremantle and the four following days

of the voyage were fine, calm, and sunny. We skirted a coast bound by

gneiss rocks, rounded, ground, and weather-worn to smoothness, with

immense breakers dashing their foam up the face of the cliffs. Except

the beautiful harbour of Albany, it is a most inhospitable-looking

coast.

On the third day out a wireless message from Perth warned the captain

to alter his course and to moderate the ship’s lights at night so as

to disguise her. It was a significant suggestion, that the War, the

outbreak of which took place while we were at sea, but in which we

hardly yet believed, was a matter of grim earnest. Otherwise the voyage

was uneventful. We reached Adelaide, sliding in through glassy water,

with land on either side, and numbers of diving birds swimming

round us. After the inevitable delay of disembarkation that seems so

unnecessary to the impatient traveller, we at last got ashore, walked

through the Customs, merely an amiable formality, and took the train

for Adelaide, which is at some distance from its harbour. The line runs

through salt marshes, dotted with pink mesembryanthemum in flower.

Then come trim suburbs with English names, a Cheltenham among them;

presently the train appeared to be running through the streets of a big

city, and we had arrived at Adelaide station.

[Illustration: NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.]

The different capitals of the Australian states are as unlike each

other as possible, and Adelaide is especially distinctive. This

graceful garden city has none of the rawness of our dear Perth. She

has, on the contrary, an established air. The hotel at which we

stayed might have been in any large town in the world, except for a

certain friendly loquacity on the part of the staff, and a trifling

indifference to details characteristic of Australia.

The first impression of Adelaide is a delightful one. She is a city

of space and light and air, with broad, tree-planted streets and fine

buildings; in fact, more like the Australia we had imagined, because

less unlike England, than the West. The cathedral with its twin

spires dominates the whole from rising ground. The city is laid out in

straight lines, separated by parks from its spreading, growing suburbs,

the whole place is green and restful.

In the afternoon of our arrival we were motored round the city and its

suburbs, and a closer acquaintance deepened this impression, for we

passed through avenues of plane trees and saw English plants growing in

the gardens. Rising ground revealed the lovely situation of Adelaide

and gave a view of the city as a whole, scattered among her trees and

gardens, girdled by green hills rising abruptly from its environs, with

the grey Pacific spread out to infinite distance beyond. The cloudy,

hazy distances, a certain crispness in the air, as on a fine March day

at home, the grass that grows freely everywhere, and suburbs with such

names as Knightsbridge, all deepened the sense of familiarity. We shall

always see Adelaide in imagination as we looked down on her that early

spring day, with all her orchards a delicate pale pink mist of almond

blossom, and the soft grey distances that felt like home.

Of course, there was a great deal that was unfamiliar: here were hedges

of olive, thick-set and cut like box, other hedges were made of the

South African box-thorn, and everywhere the sides of the roads were

yellow with a pretty pale oxalis, regarded by the inhabitants as a

noxious weed and called Sour Sod. There were many vineyards, and sheep

and lambs feeding, for South Australia is largely a pastoral state. The

development of pastoral industries has been an important element in her

general prosperity. The pastoral settler gauged the capacities of the

land and paved the way for agricultural and closer settlement. South

Australia now has a larger acreage under cultivation in proportion

to the population than any other state, and the annual returns from

pastoral industries amount to nearly £4,000,000. In 1912 between two

and three million pounds’ worth of pastoral products were exported,

including sheep, cattle, horses, frozen meats, skins, hides, tallow,

and wool.

South Australia was declared a province under the British Crown in 1836

by Governor Hindmarsh in the reign of William IV, so that the state has

a history stretching back over a period of nearly eighty years, during

which time she has progressed rapidly, and at the time of our visit

was actually enjoying great prosperity after a series of good seasons,

though we heard on all hands in Adelaide that there had been two dry

springs and rain was badly wanted.

The climate is mild, the high temperatures that occur in summer are

mitigated by the absence of humidity, and extreme cold in winter is

unknown. Sheep, cattle, and horses live out of doors all the year round

and thrive on natural herbage, so that neither artificial feeding

nor housing is necessary, and the cost of production is thus greatly

reduced. It is superfluous to enter here into figures showing the

purposes for which the area of the state is leased or alienated, but

beyond the limits of agricultural settlement more than 143,000 square

miles are held by Crown lessees as sheep or cattle runs. Formerly the

principal part of South Australian wool was shipped to London, and

it was not till within the last forty years that local wool auctions

attained importance.

Agriculture is determined by the rainfall, which varies from 10 or

11 inches in northern and inland districts to 30 or 35 inches in the

south and in the more hilly regions. Within these widely varying

conditions almost anything can be grown from corn to grapes, nearly

every kind of cereal, fruit, or vegetable. But economically all the

conditions of agriculture are very widely different from those at

home, for it must be taken into consideration that the wages of farm

labourers are about double those paid in England, and the cost of

plant and implements about 50% more. Wheat predominates in the value

of all crops grown, for while it is estimated that the total value of

all crops, including fruit, amounts to £18 per head of the population,

the value of the wheat crop for grain and hay is over £13 per head.

The production of hay in Australia is intimately associated with the

cultivation of cereals, as the greater bulk of this fodder is composed

of wheat or oats. The Year Book returns for 1911–12 show more than two

million acres under wheat cultivation with a total production of over

twenty million bushels, a low average compared with other countries,

but against which must be set the exceptionally low cost of production

brought about by conditions of soil and climate.

One peculiarly local industry is the growth of wattle for its bark,

which is utilised for tanning leather. The industry is a lucrative one.

At from five to seven years old, when they are fit to strip, the trees

yield from one ton an acre, and the market price of the bark is from £5

to £8 a ton.

But we must again insist that in trying to estimate the position of

agriculture in Australia the different labour conditions have to be

taken into consideration. In the first place it is possible for a man

owning a team of eight or ten horses and the latest and best machinery,

to do all the work on a holding of from 200 to 240 acres of wheat

himself, with some extra help at harvest time, so extensive is the use

of labour-saving machinery--multiple furrow ploughs, for instance,

12 or 14 furrow twin ploughs on the lighter land, and 8 to 10 horse

cultivators. This being so, it can be easily seen that there is no

surplus of skilled labour, for under such conditions a capable man very

soon saves enough to begin farming on his own account, especially as he

can get cheap land on easy terms. This, of course, applies to Australia

generally; at harvest time, though the demand for labour is great and

the pay high, thoroughly efficient men are not to be had. The same

thing is true of dairying, so that the farmers are actually reducing

their herds to numbers that can be conveniently managed by their own

families with the aid of milking machines.

[Illustration: WOOL STORE, PORT ADELAIDE.]

At the same time the Labourers’ Union has drawn up a “log” of prices

and hours of labour, and requires its acceptance on the part of the

farmer, who would be willing enough if the supply of labour were

efficient. Economists question whether, if these conditions, including

the regulation of hours, were enforced, the result produced might

not be an increased adoption of grazing, where hardly any labour is

required.

In the pastoral industry all conditions of labour and living are fixed

by the Arbitration Court, and good accommodation is provided for

shearers. Among farmers, on the other hand, though good food is always

provided, the men often have to sleep in machinery sheds. Here, as

everywhere else, labour is dependent not merely on supply and demand,

but on desirable conditions of employment, and it is extraordinarily

interesting to see our tentative efforts in the direction of Wages

Boards, and the regulation of employment, reproduced in the form of

the finished article in the Commonwealth, which had no great mass

of vested interest and tradition to oppose to a generous system of

Labour Legislation. It must be remembered, however, that Australia

can hardly yet be considered as a manufacturing country, though her

industrial development has been so rapid in recent years, that the

total value of manufactures already amounts to more than a quarter of

the whole production of the country. It is calculated that the value of

productions from all sources per head of the population exceeds that of

any other country.

The Australians meanwhile, seeing the course which the future

development of their country is likely to pursue, have taken time by

the forelock, and in order to obviate the recurrence of the disastrous

conditions in the Old World have inaugurated an elaborate system of

Labour Legislation calculated to safeguard the interests of working

men and women in all branches of occupation. Such measures as Wages

Boards, Conciliation and Arbitration Court Systems, a minimum wage

under the Factory Acts, an eight-hours day, early closing, and holiday

regulations, are accomplished facts all over Australia, though their

constitution is not uniform in the different states.

A Government Labour Exchange was established in 1911 to bring employer

and workmen into communication. This does not, of course, include

professional and clerical labour. All the departments of Public

Service, including the railways, apply to the Labour Exchange for

workmen, and if the work lasts for less than two months the men’s fares

are refunded to them.

Of course, not all Australians see the social development of their

country in the same rose-coloured light. The social reformer and the

moral enthusiast are seldom business men; to such the question appears

in a wholly different aspect--in terms of material profit and loss.

Each state has its own industrial problems, and the question of

water supply occupies the attention of all who are concerned with the

development of South Australia, for the only area in the Commonwealth

having an average annual rainfall of less than five inches, the Lake

Eyre region, lies within the limits of this state. Throughout the more

closely settled part of the state the difficulty has been met by the

Government by the construction of reservoirs and the distribution of

supplies.

CHAPTER VIII

COMPULSORY TRAINING AND SOCIAL LIFE IN ADELAIDE