SOMERSET
No one was sorry when, about sixteen days after leaving Singapore, the
coast of Australia hove in sight. We passed through Torres Straits,
which were adorned with the remains of three recent wrecks, and
anchored off Somerset, the northernmost township in Australia. It is
merely a pearl-fishing station, and will never develop into anything,
as there is no back country to it. The pearl-fishers who live there
are a rough-looking lot, not encumbered with any superfluous clothing,
and generally without shoes or stockings. Their trade, which is an
exceedingly profitable one, is carried on by means of black divers,
who go down and bring up the mother-of-pearl shells. These shells,
which are about a foot or sixteen inches across, and shaped like
an oyster-shell, were worth at that time nearly £250 per ton. The
pearls found in the shell were reckoned to pay all expenses, and the
profits were enormous. Even at the present time, when pearl-shell has
fallen in value to £140 a ton, it pays well to get. There is another
pearl-fishery on the western coast of Australia, and some of the pearls
obtained there fetch large prices. Though they are never equal to the
Oriental pearls in colour, they make up for it in size, and I heard
of one being sold in London recently for £1500. The West Australian
pearl-fisheries are liable to the most terrific hurricanes. The signs
which herald their approach are perfectly well known, and give ample
time to a vessel to secure a good offing. But the pearl-fishers are
generally much too recklessly intent on their occupation to take any
such precaution, and every now and then the whole lot of them get swept
right away, some of their boats being sent to the bottom, and others
blown clean out of the water into the mangroves that fringe the shore.
The few that are not drowned in one of these visitations do not seem to
care or take any warning. _Mox reficit rates_, the pearl-fisher picks
up the pieces, sends off for another schooner if his own is hopelessly
damaged, and goes on again as if such a thing as a hurricane was
unknown.
One or two white men, who have nothing to do with the pearl-fishing,
have taken up their permanent abode at Somerset for no reason at all
that I could see, except to enjoy the society of black women and to
run an imminent risk of being knocked on the head by black men. The
blacks in the neighbourhood of Somerset are very bad. They are a
fierce warlike race of athletic savages, with a cross of the Malay in
them. The Government Resident at Somerset wages an endless war with
them, and from the intrepid bravery which he has always displayed in
his encounters with them he has established a wonderful prestige. So
recklessly daring, and so successful have some of his raids against
them been, that he is firmly believed to be the Devil by all the
natives in the Somerset district. A mob of about 200 of them once came
and camped on an island opposite to his residence. He knew that they
would very shortly attack him, so he determined not to wait for them.
As soon as it was dark, he stripped himself naked, and tying his rifle
and his ammunition on to his head to keep them dry, he swam across to
the island. The tide ran very strong, and the channel was a quarter of
a mile wide, but he got across all right.
[Illustration: A QUEENSLAND BLACK.]
Without the slightest fear he attacked the whole camp of blacks single
handed, and routed them utterly. So terrified were they at the fact
of one white man daring to attack them alone, that they came to the
conclusion that there must be something superhuman about him, and
cleared out with all speed. It was months before he was troubled with
them again. He has been there now for a good many years, and numerous
are the hairbreadth escapes that he has had during that time. So far
his courage has carried him safely through, and though he has often
been wounded, he has never come to serious harm. But his enemies are
numerous and implacable, and it is odd if a spear or a tomahawk does
not finish him at last.
From Torres Straits right away to below Cape Capricorn, runs the
great barrier reef of Australia. Inside this the navigation is very
intricate; a perfect network of islands and reefs. We took a pilot on
board at Somerset, but even then we had occasionally to anchor at night
when there was no room. The scenery all down the coast of Queensland
is very wild, and in some parts extremely beautiful. Endless masses
of wooded mountain-ranges run all along the mainland, and some of the
islands with their emerald slopes dotted over with patches of dark
green firs are very picturesque.
Whit-sunday passage, just before coming to Bowen, is one of the
prettiest bits of scenery on the whole coast of Australia. The ranges
on the mainland here are very broken, and just off the shore is a
large group of lovely islands, between which and the mainland the
coasting-steamers’ track passes. It looked very beautiful in the
evening, when the mountains were turning to that soft clear smoky blue,
peculiar to Australian scenery, and the crimson fire of sunset was
still smouldering in the golden west.
The _Somerset_ did not call off Mackay, which was my destination, so I
had to go on to Keppel Bay, the port for Rockhampton, 200 miles farther
south, and wait for a boat back to Mackay.
I left the _Somerset_ with feelings of unmixed joy, and with a hearty
hope that she might go to the bottom when she got into Sydney harbour,
and stay there. Since that time, to the great delight of everyone
who ever travelled in any of their boats, the Eastern and Australian
Company have abandoned the Queensland mail service, after losing nearly
all their boats. The _Brisbane_, the best boat they had, was wrecked
near Torres Straits. The _Normanby_ shared her fate soon after. The
_Singapore_ ran ashore near Mackay and was totally lost, and the
_Queensland_ was run into by the _Barrabool_, and sunk just off Sydney.
They were altogether a most unfortunate company, and were very badly
treated by the New South Wales Government, who induced them to start by
the promise of a large subsidy, which promise was repudiated as soon as
the company’s ships began running. Their place has been taken by the
British India Company, who run a service of very fine boats from London
to Brisbane _viâ_ Batavia, carrying the mails, and calling at Thursday
Island, Cooktown, Townsville, Bowen, Mackay, and Keppel Bay on the
Queensland coast. They do not run farther south than Brisbane, and have
no subsidy from any Government except that of Queensland.
My brother met me in Rockhampton, and we were fortunate enough to find
a boat sailing for Mackay a few hours after I landed. We ran up to the
entrance of the Pioneer River, on which Mackay is situated, in about
twenty-four hours, and had to anchor there and wait for the tide to get
in. We amused ourselves by fishing for sharks, and caught one about
six feet long. About one o’clock in the morning the tide served, and
we steamed up the Pioneer for a couple of miles, and lay alongside
of a rather dilapidated wharf. No one appeared to take sufficient
interest in the arrival of the steamer to be on the wharf, and, beyond
a few sheds, I could not, at first, see any signs of a town at all. My
brother knew the way, however, and, collaring as much of my luggage
as we could carry, we set off to the hotel. Following his lead, I
floundered through a mass of black mud and several deep puddles of
water, and emerged on to a road about three inches deep in dust. After
going along this for a hundred yards, some buildings began to loom up
against the starlit sky, and a little farther on we turned a corner,
and found ourselves in the main street of Mackay.
It might have been the city of the dead for any signs of a population.
Not a light was to be seen in the rows of uneven, low, wooden buildings
that ran along each side of the street, and the only living creatures
were several dogs fast asleep in the middle of the road. Turning
another corner, we stumbled over the body of a man with his heels on
the pavement and his head in the gutter. His hat was off, and he was
evidently in the total-collapse stage of drunkenness. My brother struck
a match and examined his features.
“Ah, I thought so,” he observed; “it’s the doctor. He’s been like that,
off and on, for a fortnight. Here, lend a hand, and pull him out of the
gutter. He’ll have a fit if he lies like that much longer.”
Having dragged him into a less apoplectic position, we turned into the
hotel. There was no one up, but it was open; so we went upstairs and
hunted about for a couple of empty rooms. After one or two bad shots,
which disclosed the prostrate forms of several sleepers, most of whom
had gone to bed in their boots, we found what we wanted, and turned
in. It was pretty hot, and the musquitoes made it rather lively, but
we got a few hours’ sleep, and next morning turned out early to get
ready for a start up to the station. The first thing we heard from my
brother’s black boy, who was waiting about the town for him, was that
the horses had got out of the paddock. They were certain to go straight
back to the station, so my brother borrowed a horse and sent the boy
down the road to look for them. He got them about ten miles away, and
did not reappear till the middle of the day.
Meanwhile, I amused myself by examining the town of Mackay. Of all
horrible places to live in, the worst is a small coast town in
Queensland. They are all alike. The streets are very broad, and almost
all the houses built entirely of wood, with verandahs in front of them,
extending over the pavement. There is not a green thing to be seen
anywhere. Dust is everywhere, inches deep in the streets that are not
macadamised, and trees, bushes, houses, and everything are powdered
over with it. In summer it is sweltering hot, the glare is frightful,
and before I had been half an hour in Mackay, I began to understand why
my brother was in such a hurry to get out of it. When I first landed
there, the white population of the whole district was under 2000,
and that of the actual township under 1000, but I counted seventeen
public-houses in the place. The first thing that struck me was that
not a single man in the town had a coat or waistcoat on, and the next
thing that struck me was what very sensible people they all were, for
it was about the middle of March, and the weather was so hot that any
superfluous clothing was unbearable.
[Illustration: THE HERMITAGE PADDOCK--MACKAY.]
There was a _table d’hôte_ at the hotel at which we camped, and at
dinner-time a crowd of men assembled for the feed. Squatters down from
the country, bank-clerks, planters, and business men, not one of
them had a coat on. Their invariable costume was a pair of moleskins or
tweed trousers, fastened round the waist with a leather belt, a cotton
shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a silk handkerchief loosely tied
round the neck. The Bushmen were easily distinguished by the mahogany
brown to which constant exposure to the sun had turned their faces,
necks, and arms.
The fashion of wearing no coats is peculiar to Mackay, and has been
adopted by the planters, who consider themselves the _elite_ of the
place. At a dinner-party on one of the plantations, it is a most
curious sight to see all the ladies, _en grande tenue_, dressed in
the latest fashion, and the gentlemen sitting down with no coat or
waistcoat, and their arms bare to the elbow.
It was one o’clock before we were ready for a start, and, as our
station was forty-five miles away, we settled to go out and camp at
a station about five-and-twenty miles up the Pioneer River, and go
on home next day. The country round Mackay is a dead level alluvial
plain for ten or twelve miles, and is all under cultivation for
sugar-growing. Our road for the first mile and a half went through a
sort of straggling township of small detached houses, each surrounded
by a grass paddock; but after this we got among the cane-fields, and
the sight of them was very refreshing after being shut up for weeks at
sea. There are few prettier plants than sugar, and the panorama of the
Mackay cane-fields is really beautiful. For miles the cane stretches
away in a level sea of emerald green, here and there a tall brick
chimney rising up to indicate the whereabouts of a mill. A broad belt
of dark green forest marks the course of the Pioneer, winding through
the plains, and beyond this again the cane-fields rise right away to
the base of rugged mountains, thickly wooded to the very summit. All
along the horizon the mountains of the coast range are piled one behind
the other in dark blue masses, their outline rising here and there into
sharp peaks against the western sky, and forty miles away towers the
mighty form of Mount Dalrymple, over 4000 feet high, the second highest
mountain in Queensland. On both banks of the Pioneer, at intervals of a
few miles, are the residences of the planters, and certainly the lines
have fallen to them in pleasant places. Their houses, as a rule, are
extremely comfortable and very well furnished, and the gardens of many
of them are paradises of beauty. In good times they make tremendous
profits, and their occupation chiefly consists in watching other people
work, in the intervals of which they recline in a shady verandah with a
pipe and a novel, and drink rum-swizzles. Most of them keep a manager,
so that they can always get away for a run down south, or a kangaroo
hunt up the country. They are very hospitable, and keep their houses
always open to strangers visiting the place, and to their friends in
the country who come uninvited, and are welcome to stay as long as they
please.
About fourteen miles from Mackay, we passed the last plantation, and
got among the gum-trees, and shortly afterwards the track struck the
bank of the Pioneer. I have seldom seen a more beautiful river. As a
rule, Queensland rivers are muddy, sluggish streams, with low banks
covered with mangroves, and many of them would not be called rivers
at all in a country where water was more plentiful. But the scenery
along the Pioneer is lovely. Its whole length is only about one hundred
miles, but it drains a large extent of country, and for the last thirty
miles the average width of its bed is from one to two hundred yards. It
rises in the coast range, and its course lies through heavily-timbered
country all the way to the sea. The banks, sometimes sloping,
sometimes very steep, vary in height from fifty to a hundred feet, and
are thickly covered with a dense forest of trees and creepers. The
river itself is a succession of deep black pools of beautifully clear
water, some of them nearly a mile in length, with long rocky rapids
between them.
The track wound along the banks for some miles, and every now and then
we pulled up to admire some more than usually beautiful reach, where
the water was turned to gold in the evening sunlight, and the dim blue
mountains showed up through the forest beyond. Swarms of ducks of every
description were paddling about in the pools, and sunning themselves on
the rocks and sandbanks.
At one bend of the river, just at the head of a deep pool, where
the “scrub” on the banks was very thick, my brother said there was
pretty sure to be an alligator, and if we went quietly we might get a
sight of it; so we got off, hung our horses up to a tree, and crawled
through the scrub down the bank to the water’s edge. Peering cautiously
through a tangled curtain of creepers that hung over the water, we were
rewarded by the sight of a huge alligator, basking on a sandbank about
sixty yards off, and apparently fast asleep. The instant we showed
ourselves, however, he shuffled into the water with incredible speed.
The upper waters of the Pioneer are inhabited by numbers of these
brutes, and some of them grow to an enormous size. One was killed not
long before I arrived, nineteen feet long, but even this was eclipsed
by Big Ben of the Fitzroy, who measured twenty-three feet six inches,
and who, when last I saw him, was in the possession of Mr. Jamrach in
London. These alligators do not seem to increase much in numbers, and
the same ones hang about the same pools for years. From October to
March, during the hot weather, they do not show themselves at all, but
during the rest of the year, in the cool weather, they lie about on
the sandbanks warming themselves all day.
The sun was getting low, so we climbed on to our horses again, and
after a three-mile canter along a splendid level track winding through
an endless forest of gums, under which the grass grew three feet high,
our destination hove in sight.
“Sleepy Hollow,” or, as it is always called, “The Hollow,” the station
at which we were going to camp that night, is about the prettiest
place on the whole of the Pioneer. As we rode up we were greeted with
a chorus of barking from a small army of cattle-dogs that were lying
about the outbuildings, and Mr. Charles Rawson, the owner of the
Hollow, came out to meet us. He gave a wild shout of delight when he
saw who it was. He was an old friend of my brother, and, seizing me by
the hand, he bade me welcome to Australia with a heartiness there was
no mistaking.
“Hooray, boys!” he said, “this is just about the soundest day I’ve seen
for a deuce of a time. If I’d known when your old dug-out was going to
fetch the Mackay wharf, you bet I’d have been there to meet you. Here,
George, take these horses and turn them into the big paddock.”
“Hold on,” said my brother. “Better put them in the small one, we want
to get away early to-morrow.”
“To-morrow! to-morrow be blowed; you’ll stop here for a week any way.
You’ll surely never be so beastly mean as to come here for only one
night?”
To his great disappointment my brother declared he must be back at the
station the next day, as there was a man coming up to pick fat cattle.
“Well, if it’s business,” he observed sadly, “I don’t so much mind;
but any way, come on inside now, and have a drop of something short.
I was just going to make it sundown when you boys rode up, and I was
suffering to look at somebody through the bottom of a glass.”
We followed our host into a cool shady verandah, and he quickly
produced the materials for a drink.
“Now, then,” said he, “just let me mix you a swizzle. What’s a swizzle!
Oh! I forgot you’d only just landed. Well, I believe a swizzle is about
the squarest drink that’s yet been invented, and there’s no one in the
district can lay over me at mixing one. But hold on till you try it.”
Never having heard of a swizzle, which is a drink peculiar to Mackay, I
believe, I watched his proceedings with interest. First of all he put
two inches of Jamaica rum into the bottom of a tumbler, into which he
shook a few drops of Angostura bitters from a bottle, with a small hole
in the cork. Next he added a small teaspoonful of brown sugar, and a
squeeze of a lemon, and filled the tumbler two-thirds full of water. He
then took a small stick with three prongs growing the reverse way up at
the end, and whirled it round in the tumbler between his hands, with a
dexterity only to be acquired by constant practice, till the decoction
was foaming to the top of the glass.
Handing it to me quickly, with directions to “drink it while fizzing,”
he watched it going down, with one eye shut, and an expression of
sympathetic interest on his face.
“How’s that for high?” he asked as I set down the glass with a sigh of
satisfaction.
I acknowledged that he had not overrated the beauties of the drink, and
asked him where he got the peculiar little stick with which he stirred
it up.
“Ah!” he said, “that’s just it. That’s nothing short of a
swizzle-stick, and it grows on a tree that’s peculiar to the Mackay
district, and no doubt a bountiful Providence placed it there
on purpose for the inhabitants to stir up their liquor with. I
discovered it myself, and it hadn’t a name, so we christened it the
_Swizzlestickia Rawsoniensis_. There’s two of them growing down there
in the paddock, alongside the fence.”
The owner of the Hollow is probably one of the most popular men in
the north of Queensland. He was one of the earliest settlers in the
district, has been identified with its rise and progress, and has not
an enemy in the place. There were wild times in the early days of
Mackay, and most of his contemporaries have been stretched out for the
undertaker, or, if they still live, are mere wrecks of their former
selves. But sixteen years of hard work and hard living in the tropics
have made never a mark on the iron constitution of our host. His head
is marble, and perfectly proof against the influence of Mackay rum,
forty-five over proof, as anyone who drinks alongside of him will
find to their cost. Many a reveller, waking after a heavy night to
repentance and a sick headache, has turned sicker still to see him
enter his room at five the next morning, with a cheery smile on his
face, a pipe of nigger-head between his lips, and an invitation to come
down and bathe in the river. He is nearer fifty than forty now, and
his hair is not quite so thick as it was, and getting gray in places.
But, to use his own words, “he has still got as bully a set of works as
there are in the island, and, bar accidents, is good for another ten
years yet.” A kind heart and an inexhaustible fund of good spirits made
him as pleasant a mate as a man could wish for, and if there’s any fun
going, from an exploring expedition to a game of euchre, he is bound to
be up to the neck in it. Having finished our drinks and lit our pipes,
we sallied out to scatter a glance round the place.
The forest has been cleared for a little distance round, and the house
and garden are surrounded by a paddock of short green turf. The house
itself is a large one-storied building, with a fourteen-foot verandah
all round covered with masses of every sort of creeper. It stands right
on the river-bank, which rises to an elevation of a hundred feet above
the bed, and the view up the river is magnificent. Right in front of
the house the bed of the river is full of rocky islands and rapids;
but above this there is a long stretch of still deep water up to the
next bend, three quarters of a mile away. The opposite bank is covered
with a most magnificent forest of enormous trees, called in Australia a
“scrub,” to distinguish it from open timbered country.
Nothing can be more beautiful in the way of a forest than a Queensland
scrub. Fig-trees, Leichardts, white cedar, red cedar, beech, and a
hundred other trees whose names I never heard, are crowded together
in wild confusion, their dense foliage mingled in masses of every
conceivable shade of green. Here and there a group of feathery palms
rear their heads above the surrounding forest, and giant creepers hang
suspended in thick curtains from one huge tree to another.
In front of the house, just on the fall of the river-bank, is a
gigantic bamboo, the father of all bamboos in the Mackay district, and
round about the house are several smaller ones. But the garden running
along the top of the bank is a sight worth going to Queensland to see.
There is fifty feet of black soil here, and it must be a mean sort
of plant that would not grow. Lemons, limes, guavas, custard-apples,
grapes, mangoes, oranges, and grenadillas, all flourish in a state
of perfection that speaks equally well for the care of their owner
and the excellence of the climate. Mangoes and oranges seem to do
especially well, and the trees of the latter were absolutely weighed
down with fruit, and Bananas and passion fruit grow like weeds. In
the middle of the garden, on a patch of smooth green turf, stands the
most magnificent Poinciana tree I ever saw, about sixty feet high, with
huge spreading boughs sweeping right down to the ground. The foliage
is light green, and exactly resembles the leaf of a sensitive plant,
and in summer it is literally covered with huge spiral flowers of the
most brilliant crimson. The roof and side verandah of the house are
overrun with masses of Boganvillea creepers, of every shade from pink
to purple, and the flower-beds around are full of roses and geraniums.
Gardenias grow all about, in bushes five feet high, and flower most
beautifully. The back of the garden is sheltered all along by an
impenetrable row of bamboos, Leichardts, and fig-trees, and in front,
just along the edge of the river-bank, runs a low hedge of hybiscus,
blazing with scarlet flowers. The front verandah of the house has been
extended into a sort of conservatory, made of a lattice-work of battens
split from palm-trees, inside which is a rockery covered with most
beautiful ferns.
The mountains and creeks of Northern Queensland are full of every
sort of fern, and in the fernery at the Hollow I counted over thirty
varieties which Mr. Rawson had picked up in his wanderings about his
own runs, and brought home and planted.