[Illustration: Map]
CARPENTER’S
WORLD TRAVELS
_Familiar Talks About Countries
and Peoples_
WITH THE AUTHOR ON THE SPOT AND
THE READER IN HIS HOME, BASED
ON THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
MILES OF TRAVEL
OVER THE GLOBE
“READING CARPENTER IS SEEING THE WORLD”
[Illustration: IN AUSTRALIA The “great white continent” in the midst of
the teeming coloured races of the Orient, our Anglo-Saxon cousins are
building a new empire of the Pacific.]
_CARPENTER’S WORLD TRAVELS_
Australia, New Zealand
and
Some Islands of the South Seas
_Australia, New Zealand, Thursday Island,
The Samoas, New Guinea, The Fijis,
and the Tongas_
BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
LITT.D., F.R.G.S.
[Illustration]
WITH 126 ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
_First Edition_
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the publication of this volume on my travels in Australia, New
Zealand, and the South Seas, I wish to thank the Secretary of State
for letters which have given me the assistance of our official
representative in the countries visited. I thank also the Secretary of
Agriculture and our Secretary of Labour for appointing me an Honorary
Commissioner of their Departments in foreign lands. Their credentials
have been of great value, making accessible sources of information
seldom opened to the ordinary traveller.
To the officials of the Commonwealth of Australia and the Dominion of
New Zealand I desire to express my thanks for exceptional courtesies
which greatly aided me in my investigations.
I would also thank Mr. Dudley Harmon, my editor, and Miss Ellen McBryde
Brown and Miss Josephine Lehmann, my associate editors, for their
assistance and coöperation in the revision of notes dictated or penned
by me on the ground.
While nearly all of the illustrations in CARPENTER’S WORLD TRAVELS are
from my own negatives, those in this book have been supplemented by
photographs from the official collections of the State and Commonwealth
governments of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the United
States Department of Commerce.
F. G. C.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START 1
II. THE GIANT OF THE SOUTH SEAS 3
III. QUEENSLAND 10
IV. A CROWN OF GOLD AND A CROSS OF CACTUS 19
V. THE METROPOLIS OF THE ANTIPODES 24
VI. WALKS ABOUT SYDNEY 31
VII. THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE 37
VIII. IN THE GREAT WOOL MARKET 42
IX. LIFE ON THE SHEEP STATIONS 47
X. RABBITS AND DINGOES 56
XI. WATER FOR THIRSTY LANDS 62
XII. MELBOURNE 72
XIII. IN THE MARTS OF THE CITY 80
XIV. THE STATE-OWNED RAILWAYS 85
XV. GOLD DIGGINGS IN CREEK AND DESERT 95
XVI. A WHITE WORKERS’ CONTINENT 104
XVII. THE THREE “R’S” IN AUSTRALIA 113
XVIII. THE ABORIGINES 120
XIX. KANGAROOS AND DANCING BIRDS 129
XX. AUSTRALIA AS OUR CUSTOMER 137
XXI. TASMANIA 144
XXII. THE PEARL FISHERIES OF THURSDAY
ISLAND 152
XXIII. AUSTRALIA’S ISLAND WARDS 159
XXIV. ACROSS THE TASMAN SEA TO WELLINGTON 165
XXV. THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 170
XXVI. “SOCIAL PESTS” 178
XXVII. THE WOMEN OF THE DOMINION 186
XXVIII. A COUNTRY WITHOUT A POORHOUSE 194
XXIX. WHERE THE WORKING MAN RULES 202
XXX. ON THE GOVERNMENT RAILWAYS 213
XXXI. THE YELLOWSTONE OF NEW ZEALAND 220
XXXII. THE MAORIS 227
XXXIII. MUTTON AND BUTTER FOR LONDON
TABLES 236
XXXIV. SOME FREAKS OF NATURE 246
XXXV. AMERICAN GOODS IN NEW ZEALAND 255
XXXVI. THE FIJIS AND THE TONGAS 263
XXXVII. THE SAMOAS 273
SEE THE WORLD WITH FRANK G. CARPENTER 282
INDEX 287
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
In the “Great White Continent” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Crossing the Murray River 2
The giant tree ferns 3
Wheat going to market 6
Wool for half the world 6
On the Brisbane water front 7
The Brisbane River 7
Queensland sugar 14
Pineapples 14
Bottle trees 15
A settler’s home 18
The hill of gold and copper 19
The sapphire mines 19
Clearing off the scrub 22
How the farmers live 22
Down town in Sydney 23
At Bondi Beach 30
Airplane view of Sydney harbour 31
Manly Beach 31
Hauling the wool clip to market 38
Some champion Merinos 38
Winter sports on Mount Kosciusko 39
Skating amid the green 39
In the sheepfold 46
To a tea party on horseback 47
Home life on a sheep station 50
The sheep shearers 51
Sheep about to lose their wool 51
Home of a station manager 54
Boys who grow up on horseback 54
The boundary rider 55
Irrigating orchard 62
Rabbit fences 63
Packing rabbit skins for export 63
A city on the reclaimed lands 66
Breaking down the scrub 66
Rescuing cattle from the drought 67
How water is saved 67
“Boiling the billy” 70
Collins Street, Melbourne 71
At the race track 78
Melbourne city hall 78
The Parliament House 79
Alexandra Gardens 79
Logging in the eucalyptus forest 86
The Governor’s house at Perth 87
Moving the wheat crop 87
An artesian bore 94
Panning gold 95
The dry-blow process 98
A camel train 99
The sheep-shearers’ “smoker” 102
The leather workers 102
The drive across country 103
Immigrants landing 110
Girls learning to keep house 111
The grammar school at Melbourne 114
How some children get to school 115
Where farm wives go to school 115
Half-civilized aborigines 118
The aborigines of the wilds 119
Turkey shooting by airplane 126
Kangaroo 127
The Australian opossum 130
Mother bear and her baby 131
In Sydney’s business district 134
Loading wheat for export 134
American machinery in Australian mines 135
Motor picnics in American cars 135
The stripper harvester 142
An Illinois harvester in Australia 142
In Hobart, Tasmania 143
Logging on a Tasmanian river 146
Hobart and Derwent River 147
Orchards of the “Apple Isle” 147
Thursday Island 150
Tattooed South Sea Island belles 150
Opening the pearl oyster 151
South Sea Islander 158
A village house 159
A South Sea warrior 162
On the shores of the Tasman Sea 163
Wellington harbour 163
A New Zealand forest 170
The beautiful coast of South Island 171
Potential water power 178
A New Zealand farm 179
The crater of Mount Tarawera 179
Developing new crops 182
A settler’s home site 183
A Maori belle 190
Women hop pickers 191
Beach at Napier 198
The great Tasman glacier 199
Christmas roses 206
The wheat harvest 206
The New Zealander’s favourite sport 207
Sheep in a turnip field 214
A private railroad 215
At the Yellowstone of New Zealand 222
Wairoa geyser 223
The hot sulphur pit of White Island 226
Maori house at Lake Taupo 226
_Poi_ dance 227
Natural fireless cookers 227
Bathers in the hot pools 230
The Maori _haka_ 231
Grading butter for export 238
The dying art of tattooing 239
A New Zealand harbour 242
The rabbit trappers’ catch 242
Mount Egmont 243
The totara tree 246
On Mount Cook 247
Kauri gum mines 254
New Zealand flax 255
Farming with tractor and gang ploughs 258
A dairy herd 259
London’s mutton chops 259
Gathering coconuts 262
Tree nursery on a rubber plantation 263
Savaii in eruption 270
Native church at Apia 271
Native mission school 271
A Samoan beauty 274
Copra ready for shipment 275
AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND
AND
SOME ISLANDS OF THE SOUTH SEAS
CHAPTER I
JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START
For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide--
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried!
Starting on a trip to Australia gives one for the moment the feeling
expressed in Kipling’s lines. The “Never-Never Land,” as it is
called, is so far away, the voyage is so long, and thoughts of the
to-be-discovered continent are so full of dreary anticipation! The vast
stretches of desert, the monotonous reaches of forests where the trees
shed their bark and the silence is broken only by the harsh cry of the
“laughing jackass,” or kookooburra bird, the fearful dryness, and the
awful heat--these things of which one reads so much in the books about
the country do not make pleasant pictures in the mind of the traveller.
One can go to Australia in three weeks on a comfortable steamer from
Seattle, San Francisco, or Vancouver; my own trip, however, was taken
after a long, hot stay in the Philippines and a leisurely drifting from
there past Borneo and down the coast of Cochin-China to Singapore and
Java. At Batavia I caught a little tramp steamer bound for the East
on a route passing through the Dutch East Indies to Torres Strait,
Thursday Island, and New Guinea, and thence going southward inside the
Great Barrier Reef to Brisbane in Queensland.
The itinerary looked interesting, the voyage venturesome, and as I
walked on board my heart sang. A day or so later it wept. The meat
was atrocious, the bread soggy, the rancid butter oil, and the water
lukewarm and bitter. As a whole, my fellow voyagers were no better than
the food. For the most part they were a motley crowd of dirty Hindoos
and Malays, with the flotsam and jetsam, blacks, browns, and whites
found scattered throughout the islands.
Moreover, two of our Moslem passengers developed a fever, which led to
our being quarantined at some of the ports. We were twenty-five long
days on the Equator, and it was only when the cool breezes off the
Barrier Reef blew new ozone into our lungs that life again seemed worth
the living.
But from the day I landed in Brisbane and started off on my journeyings
in the “lonely continent” to the day on which I once more turned my
face toward home I had no regrets that I had come. Australia was full
of surprises and of interest for me; the beauties of New Zealand and
the air of its mountains soon drove the evil out of my soul and put new
life into my bones. I decided that here was a case where the desire
“for to admire and for to see” that had sent me off to the other side
of the world had done some good to me after all. I trust that you, too,
may be glad that I went and that I have set down here the story of what
I saw.
[Illustration: The few rivers of Australia are short and mostly
unnavigable. In summer many of the streams dry up entirely or form a
series of detached pools. The one big river system is the Murray, on
the eastern side of the continent.]
[Illustration: In some dense Australian wilds are towering tree ferns
such as disappeared from the rest of the earth before the Coal Age and
are now seen elsewhere only in the fossilized remains of prehistoric
times.]