RURAL LIFE, MOUNTAIN, AND FOREST
PEOPLE at home do not know the true meaning of the word “loneliness,” and
we often hear English labourers and their wives talking of isolation,
when there is a church and village only a couple of miles off, or other
cottages and farms, at any rate, within walking distance of them.
Indeed, we are, in general, so used to living closely huddled together
that we get scared when we are alone in any large open space, with no
single sign of humanity, fenced and cultivated land or smoking chimney
within sight. The less educated people are the more awful this
loneliness seems, till the wild cliffs of Cornwall and the moors of
Yorkshire and Devonshire become to their distorted fancy fearful and
pixie-haunted places. And yet even the loneliest of all these lonely
spots is densely populated in comparison with the country districts in
Australia where one meets with people who have lived all their lives as
much as 200 miles away from any town or railway-station, and with
children, and even grown-up men and women, who have never seen any white
person outside their own families. If you can imagine that,—imagine that
there are women who have never seen how other women dress or do their
hair, and young men who have met not a single person of the opposite sex
beyond their own mother and sisters; whose stores are brought to them by
bullock-waggon or team from a far-distant town, having themselves never
even seen a shop-window; who receive no letters because there is nobody
to write them; who would not know if the whole of Europe were convulsed
with war because they see no papers; who have no knowledge, no
aspirations, no hope, simply because they see no outside person whose
life they may compare with their own—if you can imagine this, I say, and
all that it means, then you may realize a little what true loneliness is.
To be able to ride mile after mile, day after day, and see no living
soul; to know that nothing can happen beyond birth and death, rain or
drought; to live only with animals, and with two or three of your own
kind, whose every vice and virtue, expression and thought you know as
well as you know the nature of your own sheep and cows; to be a man or
woman, with all the strong passions and instincts of your sex—all the
stronger from the fact of living so perpetually among animals—and yet
with no chance of honourable marriage before you; no games, no society,
no diversion, no possibility of any change: if you could only realize it
all—you women gossiping over your gates through the long summer evenings
in England, with your children playing before you in the road; you men
gathered round your village club or public-house fires, on cold winter
nights, grumbling about the weather, discussing the news of the day
together, walking home through the village, flinging a “goodnight” on
this side and on that; all of you living your human, homely lives; every
boy and girl with a sweetheart to walk out with on Sundays; and the
squire and the parson at hand if you are in trouble, and a club doctor
within reach if you are ill.—If you could only realize what it means,
this awful loneliness of the far places of the Empire, you might be a
little more contented with your own lot, and have more respect for the
men and women who have fought through such frightful conditions, who have
kept themselves and their children clean and sane, and with it all,
helped to the making of a new nation.
The question of eugenics is a difficult one for a mere scribbler to touch
upon, but it seems strange that a people which is endeavouring so
strenuously to keep itself entirely white—realizing fully the danger of
mixed marriages—has not also realized more completely the grave danger
arising from intermarriage—and worse—among these isolated families, {232}
and the appalling percentage of lunatics which it produces.
All this is but part of the crying need for closer settlement; it is also
a proof of what I mentioned in my last chapter regarding the
accommodation needed for agricultural labourers; the irrigation which
will make closer settlement a possibility, and—conversely—the closer
settlement which will make irrigation practicable. Still, I believe that
married men with families, and not stray bachelors, are the people needed
in the agricultural districts, or, to go even farther than this, little
colonies of people from the same country, county, or village; while, on
the whole, it is more in Southern France, Italy, and Spain, than in
England that suitable families, with some knowledge of working in hot,
dry climates and of the possibilities of irrigated land, are most likely
to be found.
People, at home, attempt to judge Australia as they judge some people.
“Oh, all the Smiths have tempers!” they will say, and imagine that
thereby they have disposed in half a dozen words of twice as many
individualities, and root and branch of the entire Smith family, whose
characters may be as divergent as the points of the compass; and:—“Awful
place for drought, isn’t it?” is the almost inevitable question asked
when I have mentioned Australia; usually followed by the remark, “Awfully
hot, too.” Size means nothing whatever to such people; if they have any
idea of any variety of climate in Australia, they think that it must be
“cooler up north,” quite ignoring all that they have ever heard of
Queensland and the Northern Territory, which alone covers 523,620 square
miles. Victoria is the smallest state in Australia; still, it contains,
roughly speaking, 87,884 square miles and an extraordinary diversity of
climates.
About eight years ago I met a Victorian schoolmaster whose little boy of
seven had never seen rain; and shortly after that another who lived in a
district that was under snow during the greater part of the year. There
are dense forests—notably those in the Western districts, where the trees
grow so closely together that the people spend their lives in a sort of
semi-twilight: while the mud is so deep along the forest tracks that they
have to do all their travelling on horseback; and their carting by means
of sledges, the runners of which will slide along over the top of the mud
instead of sinking and sticking in it as wheels would do. Once I was
staying with some people near Camperdown whose parlour-maid hailed from
the depths of the forest, some thirty miles away. An afternoon a week
off to see her parents was out of the question, but occasionally she had
a couple of days’ holiday, and then thought nothing of the thirty miles
or so on horseback each way. Though to my English mind it seemed an odd
way for a parlour-maid to take an outing. And such an immaculate
parlour-maid, too! waiting at table in such a neat black frock, with such
snowy apron and cap, that it was difficult to realize her rising at dawn
and riding off cross-legged on the wiry little steed, which the servants
had for their special use, into the mysterious twilight of the forest.
In sharp contrast to such places as this is to be found the bare,
sun-baked, torrid region of Mildura, a place where at one time there were
more aristocrats to be found than in the whole of Australia; Englishmen
of good families having flocked there, some for the sake of health, some
attracted by the wonderful fruit-growing capacities of the place. I
remember one beautiful young man “batching” there for years—cooking his
own dinner, doing the house-work, such as it was, washing up the dishes
and working meanwhile like a fury on his little fruit farm—who would come
down to Melbourne for the Cup looking as if absolutely fresh from Bond
Street. He went home for a trip not long ago, and when he came back
amused me very much by a description of a dinner which his people had
given by way of welcoming him back. He was a gay person; he had been
interested, and amused, and stimulated to talk by the evident interest
everyone showed in his adventures, and still talking and laughing, not
thinking what he was doing, as the ladies rose to leave the table, from
the long force of habit he began to collect the dishes and plates, to
scrape them, and pile them one on the top of the other, under the very
eyes of the amazed butler and his minions.
[Picture: Loading fruit on the Murray at Mildura]
The first settlement of Mildura, which is on the border of Victoria and
New South Wales, was in 1884, the settlement being run and the first
irrigation scheme inaugurated by the famous Chaffey Brothers. In 1887
the Chaffey Brothers Company, Limited, was formed, and recognized as
supreme until 1895, when the place was taken over by the Mildura
Irrigation Trust. The population, which, when the first census was taken
in 1891, was 2,321, has now increased by another 5,000, and may well go
on increasing, for Mildura is in a thriving condition. Very nearly all
the dried fruits which come from Victoria, and the greater part of the
canned fruits also, have been grown in Mildura, which is very certainly
the garden of the garden State. In 1908 the value of the fruit exports
of Victoria—nearly all of them from there—amounted to £153,062, the dried
raisins and apricots alone being worth £84,627; Mildura’s one rival in
this respect being Renmark, in South Australia, Mildura heading the lists
with sultanas and other raisins, and Renmark with currants and other
dried fruits. Still, in 1908, dried fruits were imported from overseas
to the value of £99,518, and fresh fruit to the value of £107,666, so
there is still an opening for “noblemen’s sons and others” in Australia.
Among these, men with the right sort of wives will certainly prove of the
most value to the country; though I would not wish to be as invidious as
the lady whose advertisement I once read in the _Melbourne Age_, and who
proffered herself as prepared to fill the post of housekeeper to a
“bachelor or gentleman.”
Australian scenery has earned for itself the title of “melancholy,” and
in places this can scarcely be wondered at. One can well realize the
feeling of depression and foreboding that is produced by the wide stretch
of unhumanized country—covered for the most part with a short
khaki-coloured grass, and rendered spectral and unreal by the white
ring-barked trees that dot it—in the mind of people fresh from the lush
greenness of Devonshire, or the closely cultivated land of the English
Midlands; crossed and recrossed as it is with flower-decked hedges; cut
up into little compact, sheltered fields; having nothing in common at all
with those vast paddocks, the stretch of which is scarcely broken by the
wooden posts and wire which separate them from each other at the distance
of many acres.
That there are numerous districts such as these in Australia I must
confess, though far fewer in Victoria than in other States; while it
seems to me that the very last adjective to be applied to the landscape
around Melbourne is that of “melancholy”; if one must use a hackneyed
phrase, “smiling” would be far more to the purpose.
Take the train from Melbourne and drive out to St. Kilda, the Brighton of
Melbourne; there is nothing to depress one there—plenty of trees, blue
sea and sky, crowds of well-dressed, cheerful people: Jews—Jews in
plenty—yet not the Jews of the poorer quarters of London or other
European towns, but prosperous, well-dressed Jews that are a credit to
any country.
Then change from the cable to the electric tram, and go on to the
_bona-fide_ Brighton and Middle Brighton. There is the remains of a
swamp at one side of the line, it is true, but that is being drained and
made habitable as quickly as the work can be done, and already there is a
fringe of houses among the trees at the edge of it nearest to the sea,
while at the other side rises a soft green mass of tree-decked
undulations, dotted with clusters of pleasant villas.
Once Middle Brighton is reached there are trees either side and
prosperous houses standing in wide gardens; the brilliant blue sea to the
right, a couple of hundred yards from the line.
Then, again, take the train and go farther along the coast, to Hampton,
where the Ti-trees are a study in themselves and the grass above the
cliffs sheeted with yellow Cape-weed during the spring months.
Then take another short train-ride, or walk to Sandringham, with its fine
club-house and beautiful undulating golf-course; to Mentone; to
Frankston; to a dozen other places, all within an hour’s journey—or but
little more—from Melbourne. Or stay a week at Mordialloc, with its
exquisitely appointed little hostel, reminiscent of all the best in our
old village inns at home—a peaceful, shady place this, with a long arm of
the sea winding for miles inland, dotted with white-sailed
pleasure-boats, or bright green tubs, in which misanthropic fishermen sit
smoking, day after day, as they watch their float—the only melancholy
note in the cheerful scene.
Or break away inland on to the high, bracing, open country around
Oakleigh, with the blue Dandenong Ranges in the distance, and many acres
of market-gardens, from which a long procession of carts trail down to
the Victoria market three times a week—at an hour when all the lights of
the town are still burning, to be met returning again as the inhabitants
of the suburbs flock in to their work—laden high with manure from the
city stables, on the top of which, more than likely, the wearied-out
husbandman is sleeping peacefully, while the horses make their decorous
way homeward, with a wise air too dependable to be described as human.
Where there are no market-gardens on the heights there is rough common
land, white with heath and kindred shrubby plants, while across the open
country there blows such an air—clean, and clear, and invigorating.
Still farther on the line runs right up into Gippsland, the black,
luscious soil of which grows the finest grass in Victoria, a paradise of
a place, where drought is hardly known—a district showing, indeed, only
one blot on its scutcheon, and that—shared by almost every other dairying
centre, and the work of man and not of Nature, who has, indeed, been
bountiful to Gippsland—the terrible overworking of the children by their
parents, in the greed for quick gain and dislike of paying out any money
in wages, which is such a crying disgrace to the country.
Children, who often have three miles or more to walk to school, are
expected to be up at four in the summer, and but little later in the
winter, and milk ten or twelve cows before they start off on the long
tramp to their legitimate day’s work. To the young Gippslanders the cow
seems indeed an awful and all-devouring Moloch, eating up alike their
youth, their hours for play, their strength, and vitality. I once had a
most charming girl, the daughter of a prosperous Gippsland dairy farmer,
as a sort of general household help. She could not touch milk—she could
not bear the sight of it. If she brought me a glass of it on a salver, I
have seen her throat swell and the tears come into her eyes in her effort
to keep from retching. She was very pretty and refined, and her people
were well off; but every day, almost ever since she had been able to
reach the cow’s udder, she had milked from ten to fifteen cows, morning
and evening, till—luckily for her—body and soul had alike rebelled. Her
parents considered it most derogatory that she should be working with a
stranger for a fixed wage; but she declared that she would do anything
rather than go back to the farm, where her two little brothers of ten and
twelve were already doing their share of the milking, each morning before
they went to school and each evening after they returned. That the
brains of children so overworked cannot be of much use to them during
their school-hours is beyond a doubt; and that their physique suffers
equally with their intelligence is clearly shown by the stunted and jaded
little old men and women who fill the benches of the preparatory schools
in the dairying districts.
Quite the most beautiful piece of country within easy reach of Melbourne
is, to my mind, to be found along the Healesville line. By the time that
Croydon is reached, one hour only from the city, the scenery becomes
completely rural. Here at least there is not the faintest hint of
melancholy to be seen. The lie of the land is delightfully undulating.
At every turn of the line one catches sight of compact little orchards,
and gardens, and prosperous homesteads. There are trees everywhere, and
peeps of the clear blue of the Dandenong ranges between them.
[Picture: Ring-barked trees and maize]
It is indeed all “a dimplement of ups and downs,” a prosperous, smiling
land. In the early spring, when the orchards are out, and hillsides and
valleys are white with plum-blossom, and the wattle runs a line of pure
yellow along every hedgerow, rioting out in places, from sheer exuberance
of growth, into veritable forest trees, each like a bouquet of yellow
bloom; then, indeed, there is little of sadness to be seen, and if any is
felt, it is but that we cannot renew our youth in common with Nature.
From Croydon upwards the valleys grow deeper, the hills higher, the
paddocks wider; the whole country less snug and compact. One passes
vineyards, the largest belonging to Victoria’s adored Madame Melba; and
beautifully fenced and kept pasture-land, part of the estates of the
prima donna’s father, Mr. Mitchell, famous not only for his daughter,
but—quaint enough contrast—for his pigs and his bacon factory. The trees
are big here, and cast wide-stretching shadows, beneath which the cattle
congregate during the heat of the day. How I wish I could paint the
landscape! It is all a study in pastel tints, with none of the crude
primary colours seen in tropical regions, no vivid scarlets or emerald
greens. The distant hills are grey-blue, the middle distance a
brownish-blue, the fields, even in spring, of a yellowish tint, save
where they are blotted by velvety shades. The gum-trees, here in the
open, are very large and beautifully proportioned, with their huge limbs
growing to within four feet or so of the ground; and the foliage is grey,
or golden, or brown, or shaded with madder tints—but never an absolute
green; while over all hangs for the most part a delicate shimmer of heat,
the colour of the palest blue larkspur.
Finally, as you disembark at Healesville Station the arms of the hills
enfold you, while in every direction around you swell the bosoms and
shoulders of them, deep with massed trees. The township itself is clean
and cheerful, yet inclined to stuffiness; so one hires a horse and buggy
and drives farther afield up the mountain-side, or else adventures one’s
life in the public motor—which has replaced, within my memory of
Australia, the tranquil old coach—and starts away up over the Black’s
Spur, along a road which follows the actual track made by the aboriginals
in those days when they divided the forest ranges among themselves—the
opossum, the native bear, and kangaroo.
Better abjure the motor, though—it is a brute—and, waiting until it and
its smell are past, hire a couple of horses at the hotel and drive up the
mountain far enough in its wake to be able to forget it.
The road is wide, and for a while it runs along comparatively level
ground, in one place crossing a bridge, and passing a wilderness of
overgrown gardens, where some earlier settlers’ dwellings must have been,
and where there is still a lilac-bush that blossoms bravely each spring,
and pink monthly roses, and clumps of fuchsias, a few rough broken walls
and a blackened hearthstone—a melancholy sight this, that all the gallant
gaiety of the flowers fails to modify.
[Picture: A bush giant]
Then the road begins to wind steeply upwards, up and up. Every now and
then one catches the delicious sound of running water from the jealously
guarded stream that helps to supply Melbourne. As the forest grows more
dense the trees rise higher and higher in their efforts to catch the
light, their white-skinned forms hung with long, russet-tinted rags and
tatters of bark. Such trees! One’s eye follows them upwards with a
feeling that is little short of worship—not for the trees themselves,
though one might adore worse gods, but for the something pure and
elevating to which they seem to lift one. Surely no cathedral ever built
with hands could be so sacred or awe-inspiring as this sanctuary of the
woods, with its tapering white pillars, some as much as 300 feet in
height.
Far above one, on the right as one winds up the tortuous road, tower
these giant gums, their very roots adapting themselves to the steep
graduate; those on the highest part of the slope short and sturdy, stuck
out like feet at an acute angle to the trunk. The tap-root thick and
straight, and the roots on the lower slopes long and slender like ropes,
while beneath them flourish a mass of saplings and tree-ferns. To the
left one looks down on a sea of green, out of which the tallest of them
stretch white arms, and now and then, as the road turns, one catches a
glimpse of more mountains, blue with distance; or a stretch of hillside
where the trees have been stripped by fire, or ring-barked, and stand all
naked and ashen white, strangely glacial in appearance, against the blue
background.
Over the mountain is “Lindt’s,” where the motor disgorges its passengers
for a couple of hours or more before the return journey. There is no
need, should you wish to go there, to waste your breath in explanations
to anyone around Melbourne; you have simply to mention the name, and they
will all be ready to tell you the distance and the way to reach the
place. It is a boarding-house, such as in England we could never even
imagine, built all on one floor, with many meandering passages and odd
corners, the whole structure having spread gradually to supply the demand
made upon it. But, after all, it is not an ordinary boarding-house, and
it is not an ordinary hotel, though as many as twenty casual guests will
often lunch there on a fine day, while a number of the best class of
Melbourne people stay there from Saturday till Monday, or even for the
entire summer holidays; though, to my mind, in the winter—when the big
wood-fires are all burning and the forest shivers around it—there is a
more subtle delight to be found in the place; besides, though high, it is
sheltered from the coldest winds, and it is glorious to feel fresh and
vigorous enough for real long walks. Still, it is not the scenery, the
giant gums, and tree-ferns, the mountains, and the peep between them of
an immensity of distance—no words can ever describe the all-exquisite
blue of the distance in Australia—that makes the place so distinctive,
for there are other spots as favoured. It is Lindt himself, the great
man, the mighty talker. He is so vigorous that he must be moving and
talking the whole time, and he moves in a large breezy way; while he
talks—well, he talks like nothing in the world so much as Longfellow’s
“Hiawatha.” For years he lived in New Guinea, and has some of the most
beautiful photos I ever saw taken there by himself. He will show them to
you—he will show you anything, including his own heart—I do not know that
he would not even show you his bank-book.
The coming of the motor every day is either a tragedy or a comedy to Herr
Lindt; it is quite enough, anyhow, in the play of the emotions that
overflow on to you from “mine host” to make an entire drama.
Each midday when he goes down to the gate to await the arrival of this
chariot of fate, it is heralded by a sort of Greek chorus, in which all
the parts are taken by Lindt, at one moment a pæan of hope, and at
another a dirge of despair. As the motor rounds the last corner—even if
you are some yards away up the rustic steps which lead to the house and
cannot see it approach—a subtle but distant change in the atmosphere
tells you in a single moment whether the luncheon-table is going to be
full to overflowing or graced only by a bare two or three beyond the
resident guests. But deep as Herr Lindt’s feelings are, they do not long
remain too deep for words, and if the worst has happened, the storm
bursts in a torrent.
“Nobody coming!” he will cry, as if the expression of his grief was
literally squeezed out of him by some internal agony. “Nobody—nobody—One
gentleman and a female—and the driver! O mein Gott! mein Gott! Ach Gott
in Himmel what have I done to be thus ruined? Ach! tut! one mann mit a
female, and dinner ready for twenty! It is mein death, mein ruin!”—and
the huge man will almost weep with sheer disappointment.
Sometimes, out of mischief, I would remind him: “I am here, Herr Lindt;
you have me, you know.” And this was always the last straw. He was too
uniformly courteous to express his opinion as to what I might amount to
as far as money went, but you should have seen the look that he would
cast on me as he opened the little gate, with all the air of a fallen
monarch, to the one or two passengers that the motor had brought to him.
Still, in general, he was the most genial of hosts; no trouble was too
great for him to take for the comfort and amusement of his guests.
Besides, he is the Lindt of Lindt’s! He has created Lindt’s, adapting
one of the most beautiful spots possible to human needs; not merely the
needs of food or shelter, but that other need which we all feel—for a
flavour of personal liking and interest that will hold us, even when the
best scenery in the world seems but dust and ashes.
An alternative of Lindt’s—and in some moods, also in some company, a very
seductive one—is afforded by supplying oneself with a luncheon-basket,
and driving in the motor merely to the summit of the hill, then camping
till it returns. The spot to choose is just where the clear waters of
the reserve pass at a distance of some fifty feet below the road,
separated from it only by a steep bank and a thick belt of tree-fern and
forest myrtle—another tree like the Ti-tree most absolutely Japanese in
form, every curiously twisted bough soft and grey with lichen. The
stream is looped here, and there is a little plateau of the greenest
moss—real green this time—within the arm of the loop, on which to build
one’s fire, kindling it surely and quickly with what is called
“bull’s-wool,” the thick, dry fibre, like fine cocoa-nut matting, which
forms the hair shirt of the gum-tree between the white skin and the cream
and green and madder-tinted bark.
Billy-tea—the leaves thrown into the billy while the water is boiling
fast and furious, just before it is lifted from the fire, then let stand
till they have settled—is like no other tea in the world for aroma and
flavour. A hint of the wild has somehow become imprisoned in this
domesticated beverage; it is impregnated with the scent of the gum-trees
and a species of smokiness that is somehow delicious, and, above all, it
is hot and fresh, a drink fit for the gods—though by no means to be
wasted in libations—the blue smoke of the fire, rising so steadily to the
still bluer sky, forming the incense of this woodland communion. Chiefly
I remember the thinnest slices of ham—at such picnics _à deux_—and brown
bread-and-butter, carried in the true wanderer’s fashion—a solid wad cut
out of the brown loaf and a small pat of butter inserted, then the bit of
bread that has been removed cut to a thin slice and replaced on the
top—an altogether ideal arrangement, as in the hottest weather the butter
kept cool and firm, while even if it did melt a trifle, it would only
melt into the bread, and none be lost. All this, and that divine
beverage, and the clear racing stream at our feet, and the ferns and the
trees all about us. I would draw you a little map of it—but we must each
find our own way to Paradise, and I would hurry no one, for, after all,
we cannot live our lives out in such a delectable place; while, when once
it is passed, there is one oasis the less on the desert way.
[Picture: A Haelesville gully]
In England everyone speaks of the gum-tree, or eucalyptus, as if there
was only one possible species of it, as they speak of Australia itself
and its climate. But, in truth, the gum-trees are almost as varied as
the country and the climate. They are a “pernicketty” family, too: one
sort will flourish in one place and wilt away only a few miles distant,
another grow to profusion in one district, and elsewhere hardly be met
with. Besides, all the forest growth is not composed entirely of the
eucalyptus tribe, although it is to a very large extent.
In the Victorian Grampians is to be found for the most part blue gum and
messmate, stringy bark, and red and white iron bark. In the Wombat
Forest, extending along the dividing range from Cheswick to Mount
Macedon, is found messmate, peppermint, and swamp-gum. Farther eastward
iron bark and stringy bark prevail, and red gum follows the course of the
Murray and its tributaries; while on the Wimmera Plains is massed the
dwarf eucalyptus known as the Mallee Scrubb, the roots of which make such
ideal firewood. In the Haelesville Forests, of which I have been
writing, is found spotted gum, mountain ash, messmate, and white gum, the
prevailing timber in Gippsland being the stringy bark.
Apart from the wattle, the most striking note of colour in these
softly-tinted forest masses is afforded by the sarsaparilla, which creeps
up the young trees or low-growing scrub, and hangs them with a mantle of
imperial purple. In general, however, the country regions round
Melbourne are not rich in wild flowers. There is a bluebell, more like
the Scotch harebell; a wild scabious, very similar to the English one;
little yellow bachelor-button-like flowers; and an infinite number of
tiny little blossoms, exquisite in themselves, but in no way comparing
with a field of poppies, or coppices carpeted with the true bluebell,
such as are seen at home.
The woods and forests in Victoria are under the supervision of the
Conservator of Forests, who has under him nine men on the office staff,
and seventy-seven on the field staff, a meagre enough allowance, in all
conscience, when one remembers the vast distances even in this, the
smallest of all the States; and yet, more power to it, topping all the
others in this matter, for in New South Wales the staff, including the
Director, comprises only seventy-two persons; in South Australia,
forty-four; in West Australia thirty; and in Queensland nine—Queensland!
covering an area of 670,500 square miles as compared with Victoria’s
87,884, and holding, as it does, an untold mine of wealth in its vast
forests. Queensland! the home of the red pine and the kauri-pine, the
red cedar, the Moreton Bay pine, and black-bean; and nine men to guard
the interests of all this wealth!
The Pyrenees, which, with the Bald Hills, are a continuation of Mount
Macedon, are really all a part of the great dividing range which enters
Victoria at Forest Hill, and in which is included all the most important
mountain peaks in the State; those mountains which are not actually part
of the main range being mostly offshoots from it, while not only in
Victoria is this the case, for Australia, in fact, is federated by her
mountains more completely than she is ever likely to be by her people.
The great main Dividing Range, indeed, can be traced from New Guinea
across the Torres Straits to Cape York, and thence southward through
Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria to Wilson’s Promontory, being
from there continued by the Flinders group of islands to Tasmania, a
second spur traversing Victoria in a westerly direction. South Australia
and Western Australia alone lie out of touch of this great backbone of
the continent, possessing a mountain system of their own. Thus, by the
help of forests, and mountains, and streams, the continent does not, on
the whole, present to its inhabitants such a flat desert waste as is
popularly supposed. How oddly English it is, too, in parts! I know one
place on the Dandenong line, not half an hour’s journey from Melbourne,
where there is open waste land, broken by pine-trees and ablaze with
yellow gorse in the autumn. I remember, the first time I saw it, getting
out at the nearest station and hunting about till I found a decent
lodging, then staying there for two months, and enduring all the
disadvantages of a daily journey to town—a thing I abominate—merely for
the sake of living within sight and scent of the gay homelike stuff, with
its delicious perfume.