LECTURE IINEW SOUTH WALES

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When, in 1770, Captain Cook dropped anchor in Botany Bay, he just missed discovering the finest harbour in the world. Voyaging northwards he sighted Port Jackson in the distance but did not examine it more closely, and the discovery was left to the first party of colonists, a few years later. The harbour which we are going to explore was the scene of the first real settlement, and is still the vital centre for the whole of New South Wales.

We steam through a broad channel, nearly a mile wide between the rugged points which guard it. There is no lack of room here for ships to pass one1another, and our large vessel seems quite insignificant beside the towering cliffs. On our right is a broad bay, the North Harbour, with the village of Manly at its head; on the other side of Manly, across a narrow isthmus, is the open ocean, with its long rollers thundering always in surf upon the beach. But inside the Heads the water is calm as a lake. In front of us, and beyond the North Harbour, is a narrow, winding inlet, running for miles into the hills; this is Middle2Harbour. There is plenty of good anchorage here, but it is mainly given up to pleasure boats; we are a long way yet from the commercial harbour. To reach this our vessel turns sharply southwards, behind the South Head with its lighthouses, and steams on3for about five miles up the Main Harbour. All along, on either hand, are jutting headlands, and in the bays between, especially on the south side, are seaside villages.But we shall not see swarms of bathers on the beaches as in our own country, for there are sharks in Sydney Harbour; the only safe bathing is in the surf outside. As we approach our landing-place the houses are more closely packed together, and islands are dotted here and there in the channel. We may be reminded to some degree of parts of the Clyde, or of one of the larger inlets on the west coast of Scotland; though here we find not only the most beautiful scenery but a great seaport and busy city in the very midst of it.

We turn at last into Sydney Cove, on the south side of the harbour, and here we are moored at Circular4Quay in the very heart of the city. Further on to the west, just round the next point, we see Darling Harbour,5crowded with shipping, and its busy wharves piled with merchandise. The waterway extends some miles further inland, but here in Sydney Cove is the centre of commercial activity and the landing-place of the original settlers in 1788.

Port Jackson.

Before we land let us look at a chart which shows us the long passage by which we have entered, the6windings of the harbour and the city spreading over the surrounding hills. This will give us our bearings and help us to understand the views.

We will now land, climb the hill, and look down on(4)the Cove. There, on the further side, is our vessel, lying close to the tall warehouses. Beyond it are the trees of Government Domain, with the tower and roof of Government House showing above them. The little bay on our left is Farm Cove, where the warships lie7at anchor; and beyond it again, on the next point, we see the trees of the Botanical Gardens. Then we have Woolloomooloo Bay, running up to a new and crowded suburb, and in the distance many more points and bays, as we look along the south side of the harbour back towards the sea. Or let us climb up behind our vessel, in another direction, to the library, and look down over Farm Cove. Below us, on the little island, is8Fort Denison; and across the water on the north side is Mossman Bay, where a new Sydney is growing up. It is all very different from the crowded ugliness of most of our own commercial cities.

To see something of the inside of the city we walk up George Street from the quayside. On our right is old Sydney, irregular and picturesque, built on the rocky peninsula between Sydney Cove and Darling Harbour. Here is a view of one of the old streets.9George Street itself is very modern in appearance, with its broad roadway, electric cars, and handsome stone10buildings. Here is the Post Office at one of the corners; it is built of sandstone and granite which are to be11found in abundance in the local rocks. Across George Street runs Bridge Street, one of the oldest in the city. It takes its name from the old bridge across the little Tank stream, which has now been absorbed into the underground drainage of the city, like so many of our old streams in London. There are many Government buildings in this older part as we might expect,and at the top is the entrance to Government House.

On the west side of Darling Harbour is the suburb of Pyrmont, on another peninsula; and at the base of these peninsulas Sydney is spreading and broadening out beyond the railway station. But even here, in the new suburb, are many parks and open spaces reserved for public use; while nothing can destroy the beauty of the older portion of the city, divided up by inlets, and with glimpses down many of its sloping streets of the blue water and the hills beyond. It is not surprising that the early settlers found this spot far more attractive than the open beach of Botany Bay.

As we look down on the Cove and its neighbourhood, we must remember that we have in front of us only a small part of the great expanse of landlocked anchorage available in the harbour; there is still room for unlimited growth, though Sydney has already over a third of the total population of New South Wales collected in and around it.

We must now look beyond the actual harbour, and try to place ourselves in the position of the early settlers. We have great distances to cover, since New South Wales is just half as large again as France; we must therefore keep fairly closely to the railway; but we shall not lose much by this as the railway will carry us through all the important districts of the State.

We may travel north, south, or west, and the map can give us some idea of the character of the country12through which we shall pass. Sydney lies near the middle of a long strip of coastland, shut in on its western side by the steep edge of a great plateau. In the neighbourhood of Sydney this edge goes by the name of the Blue Mountains. Here the barrier is about forty miles inland; further north, in the valleys of the Hunter and Hawkesbury rivers, the lowland widens out to nearly a hundred miles; while in someparts of the south the highlands come right down to the sea. This narrow strip was the original New South Wales.

New South Wales and Victoria: Orographical.By permission of the Diagram Co.

We can travel now by railway along the coast strip13to Newcastle, then up the valley of the Hunter, and finally climb the Liverpool Range on to the plateau beyond. But the journey was far from easy for the early settlers. In fact, until 1820, when a stock route was discovered from Sydney to Newcastle, the only intercourse with the north was by sea, and Newcastle grew up almost as a separate colony in consequence. The valleys of the Hunter and other rivers gave a natural direction to early settlement, since in their lower courses they flow through wide alluvial flats which arevery fertile and easy to cultivate. But they are subject sometimes to devastating floods, as the settlers found to their cost, while the heavy summer rainfall is not well suited to certain of our crops, such as wheat. So in the early days the colony was often in difficulty as to its main food supply.

The name Newcastle at once suggests coal; and coal is everywhere in this district. The surface of the country round Sydney is largely a barren sandstone; but underlying the whole of the area, from Newcastle on the north to Bulli on the south, and extending westward to the other side of the plateau edge, is a vast coalfield. Its chief development at present is around Newcastle. Here is a view of Hetton colliery,14Newcastle; both the name and the picture remind us strongly of the North of England. We see the coal being wound up from the shaft as in our own mines, and in the distance vessels lying at the wharves in the fine harbour. Here again is a general view of the15harbour in which we can clearly distinguish the loading of the coal and merchandise.

A journey southward from Sydney to the other end of the coalfield will bring us to a less familiar type of mine. At Clifton the early explorers found coal strewn on the beach; the actual seam is in the face of the cliff, and shows as a broad black band, while16the coal is mined by means of adits, and then run on to the little pier to be shipped. The coal is found under Sydney itself, and mining is now in progress on the south side of the harbour; but the shafts are much deeper here than at Newcastle, since the coal measures lie in the shape of a saucer, and Sydney is near the middle. We may notice here that the southern railway line ends at Nowra on the Shoalhaven river, and beyond are only a few small coast towns; so we need not at present explore further in this direction.

We will now leave the coast district for a timeand climb the plateau edge to survey the country beyond. First let us consider the nature of the obstacle by which the early settlers were faced. The Blue Mountains are merely a part of the eastern rim of a great tilted tableland of sandstone, with a steep face towards the sea and a long and more gentle slope towards the west. Down this face a series of comparatively short streams come tumbling to the sea; while on the other side of the ridge, almost within sight of the sea, are the sources of the slow westward-flowing rivers, whose courses are measured by thousands of miles.

In this sandstone block the torrents have carved out deep gorges, which often widen out up-stream into broad valleys; but these valleys are deceptive and do not provide a road to the interior, since they17end in steep cliffs over which the streams plunge in waterfalls. Here is a view of the country at Govett’s18Leap; we may notice the flat tops of the ridges, all about the same level, which suggest the old surface of a plateau. It was a long time before the early settlers found a path over this edge, and the available roads are still very few all along its length, as we may see by tracing them on the map; our train must twist and tunnel up one of the ridges between two of the valleys by a most difficult route, with steep inclines, instead of following the bank of the stream below. We realise that climbing a plateau is a far more serious matter for the engineer than piercing through a narrow ridge of mountains.

At Victoria, on our way up, we leave the train for a coach drive, to Jenolan. Here the scenery changes; the rock is no longer sandstone, but limestone, and the streams have burrowed out many curious gorges and underground channels as in our own Derbyshire. Here we have one of these in the form of a huge rock19archway through which we catch a glimpse of thecountry beyond; while far down below us flows the stream which bored out the arch. A little further on we find the stream running at the bottom of a lofty20cavern, and out into a deep and narrow gorge. Here again is a view of the interior of one of these caverns, with its huge pillars hanging from the roof and rising up from the floor. These limestone tunnels and21gorges, and the sandstone valleys with their steep surrounding cliffs and narrow outlets, are a fine subject for the artist and tourist in search of beauty, but do not suggest opportunities for settlement or farming; at the same time they are evidently a serious obstacle to movement. The bare surface of the plateau is little better; in fact, the highlands in this district are still among the most thinly populated areas in New South Wales, in spite of their nearness to the capital and the oldest settlements. So we pass through quickly, and coming out by a22long tunnel drop down to Lithgow, where we enter an entirely different kind of country. Lithgow is a manufacturing town, with coal mines, ironworks, smoke and dirt. It really belongs to the coast region, and is here, on the inside of the ridge, only because a small piece of the Newcastle coalfield, which underlies all the country which we have been crossing, crops out in this district from under the sandstone. On our journey inland we shall not meet with any other town of the same type, as we are now entering the great wheat-belt of Eastern Australia.

Here is a typical farm on the eastern edge of the23wheat-belt. Beyond the hills, which we see in the background, is the steep descent to the Hunter valley and the coastal plain. The hills are wooded, but the trees thin out and the ground becomes more open as we go westward down the long slope. We must not forget that here at the back of the plateau edge, though we are on the “Plains,” yet we are still more than athousand feet above the level of the sea. We shall realise the importance of this height later. Our next picture shows a wide expanse of level ground, under24grain, with the reapers at work. We are at Tamworth on the Liverpool Plains, not far from the northern end of the wheat-belt; but this belt can be traced from Queensland right round to South Australia, and from end to end the scenery is the same. There are the same open sunny plains, dotted with homesteads and small agricultural towns, and covered with the waving grain. Everywhere is the hum of machinery, reaping, binding, and threshing; for labour here is costly and as little as possible is done by hand. We may find it hard to tell, from the appearance of the country, where we are within a thousand miles, and we may be struck by the monotony of the view as we rush through it. None the less this great field of grain is impressive in its own fashion, if we use our imagination and follow the heavily loaded waggons to the station, and on to Sydney, and so across the ocean to London or Liverpool, until the grain appears as bread in the baker’s shop. We are watching here the beginning of the process by which the crowded millions of Industrial Europe are fed; and the wide spaces under crop may give us some idea of the greatness of the business; for we have in the wheat-belt of Australia, in spite of its great extent, only a small fraction of the wheatfields of the world.

A rainfall map is the best aid to the understanding of the position and extent of the wheat area. The25map is arranged in a series of parallel zones, which show the annual fall decreasing rapidly on the west side of the Divide, as we move further away from the coast. We are crossing one of these zones where the fall is from twenty to twenty-five inches, or not far removed from that of the eastern counties of England. This is the wheat-belt of Eastern Australia, whichfollows the rainfall right round the inner slope of the plateau as far as South Australia.

This zone gradually shades off into another rather broader where the rainfall is much lower; from ten to twenty inches at most. So the scenery changes as we travel westward until we are lost in the country of the western plains: a great dry lowland not far above sea-level, and drained by slow-moving rivers, the Lachlan, Darling, Murray and their tributaries. The railway runs north-westward, through interminable miles of grass and scrub, until it ends at Bourke, the head of navigation on the Darling. It is the land of the sheep and nothing else. We may gain some idea of the enormous extent of land in this part of Australia, available for pasture or agriculture in some form, by placing upon it for comparison the eastern part of the United States, as in the map which we see here.26

New South Wales possesses nearly as many sheep as the rest of Australia together, and most of these are to be found on the inland slope of the plateau and far out into the plains, more especially in the Riverina district, between the Murray and the Murrumbidgee. We have left behind us the wheatfield and the reapers; the loaded waggons which we pass, drawn by long teams27of horses, are carrying great bales of wool to the railway. We may follow the wool back to the shearing sheds28where again all the work is done by machinery; then we go on to the sorting shed, and so to the railway and the showrooms at Sydney, where thousands of samples29are displayed for the benefit of the buyers for the markets of Europe. We can see the great flocks of sheep before and after the shearing at the homestead30or follow them as they are driven to pasture; and everywhere in this great river plain we find the same thing repeated. The rainfall is not sufficient for agriculture; but in ordinary years it will provide good grass for the sheep; and there is also the drought-resistingsalt-bush to eke it out. Sometimes the rain fails, and then there is neither food on the ground nor water in the creeks and pools, and millions of sheep die, as in the great drought of 1901–2. The dry climate gives the best wool in the world, but it is not without its drawbacks; though the large profits made by the farmer in ordinary years more than compensate for an occasional period of drought.

The uncertainty of the rainfall shows itself in another way, in the peculiarities of the rivers. Of all the great rivers in this basin, the Murray alone, fed by the melting snows of the Australian Alps, has a good supply of water at all seasons; the rest are variable. The Darling, Lachlan and Murrumbidgee are navigable for long distances in favourable seasons, and sometimes are flooded and overflow their banks, turning the surrounding country into a huge shallow lake; but at other times they become, in places, little more than31strings of detached pools. Here is a lagoon on the Murrumbidgee, and here is the Murray evidently in32flood, to judge from the trees growing out of the water; another view shows us the river in its ordinary33state. By way of contrast here is a small creek in the Riverina district; the road crosses it by34a ford, so that it is evidently not very deep, and would soon dry up. But after heavy rains, further up-country, the creek may become for a short time a roaring torrent. Settlers new to the country have often made the mistake of camping in the evening on the near side of a creek of this kind, only to find in the morning that the ford has vanished and that they must stay where they are until the water subsides. One of the most remarkable features in Australian weather is this sudden change from drought to flood, which not only transforms the rivers but in a few days gives a covering of rich green pasture where before was a parched desert supporting only the hardy salt-bush.

When the rivers are full we can see the shallow draught steamers collecting wool and other products; but the35want of water is not the only drawback. The rivers wind greatly in their courses over the level plain, so much so that at one place it is said that the steamer takes a whole day to pass a particular house, owing to the river bending right back upon itself. The river banks are marked by lines of gum trees, by which the eye can trace them for many miles across the level. Except for this, the whole area crossed by these rivers in their lower courses is one vast treeless plain, covered with grass and scrub in the rains, but at other times dry, dusty, and monotonous. It extends into Queensland and Victoria, but its greatest development is in New South Wales: for though the other colonies have large flocks of sheep, it is here that sheep-raising is the one industry above all others; in fact, under ordinary conditions, no others are profitable or even possible. In this country, next to the sheep, water is the most valuable commodity.

The greater part of the Murray-Darling basin is filled up by recent rock sediment and river alluvium; but the narrow belt of country with a moderate rainfall, lying between the plateau edge and the western plains, has not depended for its development solely on agriculture. All along it the older rocks crop out, and in the older rocks we find the valuable minerals in which Australia abounds.

Gold, in its alluvial form, occurs all along the agricultural belt; and since the time of the first discovery near Bathurst, in 1851, the search for gold has often caused an inrush of people who have abandoned mining for the more secure and pleasant business of growing wheat or rearing sheep. Though much gold is still produced, New South Wales is not by any means the chief of the States to-day in this respect; but gold has been woven deeply into her history. One ofthe most usual methods of obtaining gold is still by dredging alluvium; but in place of the shovel and washing-pan we have the ugly machine dredger scooping out the creeks and flats where the gold is to be found. We must look elsewhere for gold-mining from the rock on a large scale; though this is increasing in New South Wales in connexion with the development of mining for other minerals, especially copper.

Well out in the plains, and south of Bourke, at the end of a branch line of railway, is the town of Cobar; it stands just where the old rocks are disappearing underneath the recent deposits. Here is one of the chief centres of copper mining; and, once the work was started, mining for other ores naturally followed. It is a desolate country, rendered more so by the nature of the industry. The furnaces for the rough smelting of the ores need fuel, but coal is far away; so that the country round has been stripped of its small supply of timber, and has nothing left to relieve its ugly monotony. The ore, partly worked, is sent by rail all the way to Lithgow, on the coalfield, to undergo the further process of refining. The importance of these mining fields to the State lies not so much in the money value of the products as in the fact that they give rise to railways and traffic and so to a further spread of the settled agricultural population. The minerals, and especially gold, have played a great part in the settlement of the less accessible or less attractive regions of Australia.

The old rocks, which disappear at Cobar, under the alluvium of the Murray basin, crop out again at the surface in the far west, and give us one of the chief silver-producing areas of the Continent. The natural outlet of the district is by Spencer Gulf, as Sydney is more than twice as far away; and the development of these mines has been largely due to the people and capital of South Australia. Here is one of the most famous mines36at Broken Hill; and here we have the camel team, the only means of transport away from the railway. We37are in the semi-desert area, and the existence of the mining population is only made possible by collecting the water from the neighbouring hills in great reservoirs,38such as we see in the picture before us.

We have still to see the south-east corner of the State, where we shall find some of the most picturesque scenery and a country rather different from that which we have so far visited. We take a line running south from Sydney, not along the coast, but following the river valleys and so up again on to the plateau at Goulburn. Here we branch off from the main line southwards through the Monaro Plains; this is a high pasture land, thinly populated, though there is a growing agricultural industry in some of the more favoured spots. To the east of the plain are the Coast Ranges, to the west the Snowy Mountains; both extending over the border into Victoria. Cooma, the terminus of the railway, about fifty miles from the State boundary, lies nearly three thousand feet above sea-level. North-west of Cooma is the town of Kiandra, in the Alps, where we find snow and winter sports as in Switzerland. South-west of Cooma is Mount Kosciusko, rising over seven thousand feet, the highest mountain in39Australia; here the snow lies even in summer. We reach it by a road following the valley of the Snowy40River, and can ride or even motor up the track almost to the summit. Here are two views of the river and41its tributaries. Kosciusko is not an imposing peak as we see from these pictures, but merely a flattened ridge42lying on the top of a great tableland, so perhaps we may be somewhat disappointed in the outcome of our visit.43

From Goulburn we begin the long descent to the level of the Murray. We are again crossing the agricultural belt, and forty miles west of Goulburn we break our journey at Yass. Here, on the banks of asmall stream, the site has been fixed for the ideal city, the future capital of Federal Australia. Notice that we can have here no great industrial and commercial centre, but merely a town like Bathurst, a centre of farming and country life. Perhaps in this it will be more representative of the real Australia than are the larger cities. In position Yass is nearer Sydney than Melbourne; but it is roughly halfway between Brisbane and Adelaide; so that it is fairly central for the long belt which contains most of the population of Eastern Australia. The city is not to be allowed44to grow haphazard; here we see the surveyors’ camp and the surveyors at work, mapping out the ground.45In the distance is Black Mountain. The whole scene is quiet and rural, but it will be very different in a few46years’ time. This deliberate choosing of a site for a new city is common in Australian history; we may contrast with this the way in which centres of population have grown up in the course of ages in old countries almost of their own accord.

We continue our journey down the slope, and crossing the Murrumbidgee at Wagga Wagga reach Albury, the border town. Here, it is necessary to change trains to continue the journey to Melbourne, for unfortunately the different States of Australia did not plan their railways on the same scale. In New South Wales the gauge of the lines is the same as that in England; in Victoria and in part of South Australia there is a broad gauge; while all the other railways in the continent are on a narrow gauge of three feet six inches. This has been adopted as the most economical for opening up a new country; but the differences have led to great inconvenience and loss, where through connexion is made between the main railway systems of the various States. We may remember how, in our own country, the Great Western Railway was forced to abandon the old and comfortable broad gauge, soas to be able to work in connexion with all the other lines which had adopted a narrower gauge; Australia has still to face the problem of unifying her railways in this respect.

We have travelled for many miles over the railways,(13)and now perhaps we may begin to notice certain peculiarities in their arrangement. First there is the main-line system connecting up the capitals. This runs north-east and south-west from Sydney, roughly parallel to the coast. Only a short stretch of this is on the low coastal plain; the rest is inside the plateau edge. The line descends through the Victorian Mountains to the sea at Melbourne; but goes inland again on its way to Adelaide. Branching from this system, or starting independently from the coast, is a whole series of lines running inland, roughly at right-angles to the coast. Some are very short, some very long; and they commonly end at a small town on one of the rivers. We can trace them right round from the line between Normanton and Croydon, in North-West Queensland, to that ending at Oodnadatta in the desert region of South Australia. Except round Bathurst, and in the country at the back of Melbourne, we shall not find many branches or cross connexions. This curious arrangement can only be understood in the light of the resources and historical development of the country; we have already seen something of its meaning in New South Wales.

We noticed that the line from Sydney left the sea at Newcastle to follow the valley of the Hunter and scale the edge of the Liverpool Downs. For two hundred miles north of Newcastle the coast district lacks a railway; but in Clarence county, in the extreme north of the State, there is a detached piece of line running for a hundred miles not far from the coast, and touching it at one or two points. This line has a meaning.

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The district is warm, as it is low-lying, and not veryfar from the tropic; while the south-east winds bring abundant rains. It has been found to be well fitted for dairy cattle, and is displacing to some extent the coast district south of Sydney where the industry first started. Sydney still provides a good local market for the dairy products of this northern region, but there is also a growing trade with more distant places. We can understand now the need of a railway to open up the country and connect it with the sea.

Here is a typical dairy farm with the cattle clustered47in the shade on the banks of the creek. We notice the abundance of trees, and the curious dead bare look of some of them. These have been ringbarked, that is, a strip of bark has been cut away right round the trunk; this process kills the tree quickly, and the dead wood can then be burnt off. It is a rough and extravagant method of clearing, and some of the forest, which grows luxuriantly in this rainy district, is put to better use. In the wetter parts are to be found the cedar and other soft ornamental woods; in the drier, are the various hard woods of the eucalyptus family, especially the ironbark and the blackbutt. It was the timber which attracted the first48settlers to this district, though the difficulty of transport has prevented them from making much use of it up to the present. Here we see the felled timber lying ready for removal; it must be dragged over rough49tracks, often for long distances, by teams of horses and bullocks. We can gain some idea, from these pictures, of the huge size of the trees and the difficulty of forest development. Evidently the forest further inland can only be attacked by the aid of the railway. We shall find similar conditions in Queensland; in fact, we may look on this coast strip as giving us geographically the beginning of the Queensland coast conditions; for round Grafton, at the southern end of the railway, we find the cultivation of the sugar-cane.

We have seen the beginning of the new capital of Federated Australia; we will now, before visiting Queensland, cross Torres Strait, with its innumerable islands and reefs, for a glimpse of Australia’s new tropical colony. British New Guinea, or Papua as it is now officially styled, was annexed in 1888, owing to pressure from the Australian colonies, and more particularly Queensland. From the first, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria contributed to the cost of administration; and in 1906 the new Commonwealth Government took over the entire control.

British Papua is a curiously shaped corner, carved50out of the eastern end of the great island of New Guinea. The western end of the island is entirely Dutch; the eastern we share with Germany. We may think of British Papua as two separate blocks, as the Gulf of Papua almost divides the territory into two. In the west is a rectangular area, with a low marshy coast, fringed with mangroves and split up by river deltas, especially that of the Fish River. The dividing line in this district between British and Dutch territory is merely a line of longitude. The country is mostly unexplored, except along the Fish and Strickland Rivers, and the natives are still fighters and cannibals. On the north of this block of country, and continuing south-east through a long narrow peninsula, is a high mountain backbone, on the other side of which is German territory. The eastern peninsula is mountainous everywhere; while the whole country is wet, densely forested and difficult to penetrate. The peninsula ends in a string of islands, mostly volcanic.

The colony is in the first stage of organisation, when the main problem is to reduce the native to some kind of order. Let us see what he is like and how he lives.51Here are two inhabitants of the coast district; they seem very different from the aborigines of Australia. Notice their frizzy hair, standing out in a great mop,and their bracelets and necklaces. The Papuans are fond of personal adornment. Here is a girl from the52same district; she wears an elaborate girdle of grass. Behind her we see the end of a curious canoe, with an outrigger. The canoe is important to the Papuan, since he commonly plants his village at the water’s edge. Here is a village, and here is a nearer view of53some of the houses; they are merely covered platforms, built on piles. Fighting and headhunting are54still the amusements of the tribes which are not yet brought under our control, but conditions are changing rapidly for the better. Here is one of the instruments55of the change, the native village constable, who seems quite proud of his office. Behind him, law and order56are represented by the visiting magistrate with a small force of armed constabulary. The chief difficulty in opening up the country is that of movement. Everywhere we find forest, mountain, and unbridged streams.57Here is the kind of track through which the explorer must force his way, and here we see two methods of58crossing a stream. The native bridge hardly seems calculated for heavy traffic. We may realise from59these pictures the nature of the task of controlling the natives of the interior, such as the formidable pair in60front of us. Even when reduced to order the Papuan is not anxious to develop the country by work on plantation or mine.

Port Moresby, the capital, stands on a fine bay in a relatively dry district. Here a few score white people represent the influence of civilisation. The climate forbids effective settlement. Here we see a61European house with its staff of servants, and here is the steamer which links Papua with the mainland. It62will be interesting to see how Australia solves the various problems of her new tropical Dependency. In Queensland we shall find similar problems, though in a modified shape.

The land route from New South Wales to Queensland does not at present follow the sea-coast. The railway at Newcastle turns up the valley of the Hunter River, climbs the steep edge of the plateau, to run along the eastern rim of the Liverpool Plains and the Darling Downs, and then descends again by a steep pass to the sea-level at Brisbane. At the little frontier station of Wallangarra we must change trains, since the Queensland1railways, as we have already noticed, are on a narrower gauge than those of New South Wales. This would be a very serious matter but for the alternative route by sea to Sydney; this is the natural route for heavy goods, since nearly all the important towns of Queensland are on or near the sea-coast. Before the advent of the railway, the sea was the sole means of intercourse for all the towns on the eastern rim of Australia; even in our own country, where the railway system is highly developed, the coasting trade is still of very great importance.

Queensland: Orographical.By permission of the Diagram Co.

The course of the railway suggests that the structure of the country is not unlike that which we have seen2in New South Wales. This is true of the Darling Downs area, but further north the map shows us a somewhat different type of country. The eastern part of the State consists in the main of a broken and irregular highland mass; the west of rolling plains, sloping gently towards the interior or the Gulf of Carpentaria; but we look in vain for a long, well-marked escarpment, such as we find further south. The mountain ridgesseem to run in every direction, sometimes, as near Cairns, forming a definite coast-range, at others striking inland or running down in spurs to the sea; so that the country is split up into a number of distinct basins, each with its own group of rivers flowing in the most diverse courses. Thus, from Cairns to Brisbane a great stretch of country, broadest in the middle, narrow at both ends, drains into the Pacific; but the Burdekin and the headwaters of the Fitzroy flow for long distances parallel to the coast, before turning and breaking through the ranges to the sea. Another group in the south joins the Murray-Darling system and belongs physically to New South Wales; the rivers of the north-west and of the Cape York peninsula drain for the most part into the Gulf of Carpentaria, while a large block of country in the west and south-west is occupied by intermittent streams, which in time of flood find their way into the inland basin of Lake Eyre, in South Australia. The country has not that simplicity of relief which we found over the greater part of New South Wales, and, as we might expect, the rainfall does not show such clear andsymmetrical divisions. The fall from the south-east winds is more irregular and more widely distributed3inland than in New South Wales; while in the north there is an area with tropical rains of a monsoon type.

Queensland: Rainfall.

On our railway journey we have crossed from one State to another, but we must notice that, except in the south-east corner, the boundaries of Queensland have no relation to the natural features of the country; they are merely mathematical lines. The reason for this is to be found in the method by which the settlement was carried out. Moreton Bay was one of Cook’s landing-places in 1770; but the Brisbane River, flowing into it, was not discovered until 1823; the first settlement was formed in 1824, and the Province remained part of the mother State until 1859, when after much agitation it became an independent settlement. The interior was not explored at the time, so that the only way of determining a boundary was to follow a line of latitude or longitude. A similar method has been used in more recent times in parcelling out unexplored regions of Africa among the European Powers. Thewestern boundary of the new State was the line of longitude 138° E., and what is now the Northern Territory remained nominally part of New South Wales, which thus consisted for a short time of two areas widely separated.

The very name of the city of Brisbane recalls the connexion with the older colony, since Sir Thomas Brisbane was Governor of New South Wales in the years 1821–5, at the time of the first settlement. The city stands, not on the shores of Moreton Bay, as we might expect, but twenty miles up the river, on both4banks, which are connected by the Victoria bridge. Here is a view over the bridge from the north bank;5,6and here is a wide view of the river beyond the city. There is plenty of space in Brisbane, with its suburbs, for the population of 100,000; there are parks and gardens everywhere, and a large number of fine public buildings. Here are the library and the Executive7Buildings in a beautiful garden, with a statue of Queen Victoria; here again the Parliament House, and here one8of the main streets of the city. We have nothing like this in any town of the same size in England, but we9must remember that Brisbane has been built for the future, and is the capital of a State more than three times the size of France.

Brisbane lies in the extreme corner of Queensland, not, it may seem, a very good position for the capital; but the south has the more temperate climate, while behind Brisbane is some of the most fertile land in the State. Westward a railway runs for nearly five hundred miles, at right-angles to the coast-line, to Charleville on the Warrego; we are about to make a rapid survey of the country from it. Twenty-five miles out, we pass through Ipswich, at the head of the river navigation; it is a busy town with valuable coal mines and the main railway works of the State. Then we climb again the steep plateau edge, whichwe descended on our journey from Sydney, and come out at Toowoomba, on the Darling Downs, fifteen hundred to two thousand feet above the level of the sea.

The Darling Downs country was reached in 1827, by Allan Cunningham, botanist and explorer, who travelled by way of the Hunter River and the Liverpool Plains; but the journey was difficult, and the first occupation was not until 1840, when Patrick Leslie brought over a few sheep and settled in the neighbourhood of Warwick. Others soon followed; the direct road to the coast was discovered, and the basin of the Condamine River became a great pastoral country where fortunes were made by the early squatters. There is less rain here than on the eastern side of the plateau edge, but it is sufficient for agriculture, and there is plenty of water in the streams. Much of the soil is volcanic in origin, and of great fertility, so that the land is wasted on10sheep. Here we see the natural grass in this fertile region, and here is a great sheep run. The rancher’s11home, which we have next, suggests comfort and success. At the present time, with the aid of the Government,12the great pastoral properties are being broken up gradually, and sold or let to farmers; so that a district which started as a sheep run bids fair to become one of the most important agricultural areas in Australia. Toowoomba, the chief centre of this fertile district, has13already the air of a busy and prosperous market town, as we may judge from the picture here.

As we travel further west the country becomes drier and rather less fertile, so that agriculture gives way more and more to sheep. The conditions are not unlike those which we found to the west of Sydney; and we have seen that the Condamine and other rivers of this area all belong to the New South Wales river system. In fact we are crossing the northern end ofthe long agricultural belt which lies behind the coast ranges. Though we are close to the Tropic, the climate is not very different from that further south, owing to the height of the plateau above the sea. There are even slight frosts in the winter. Further north, we shall find a marked change; wheat disappears and sheep give way more and more to cattle. The cause of this lies in the different conditions of rainfall and temperature. To visit this country to the north we must return to Brisbane and resume our journey along the coast.

Our first port of call is Gladstone, nearly three hundred miles north of Brisbane, on the landlocked inlet of Port Curtis, one of the finest natural harbours on the whole coast. Here is a view of the bay and the14jetty. As we see, there is no very great trade at present, no line of wharves and warehouses; the importance of15Gladstone is in the future; its chief business at present is the shipment of meat and cattle. A short railway journey takes us to Rockhampton, which lies some16distance up a river, the Fitzroy; in this it resembles Brisbane. Near Rockhampton we find a steamer17loading frozen meat from the factory. From Rockhampton the central railway runs nearly due west for over four hundred miles, to the Thompson River on the Bowen Downs. There is also a railway along the18coast to Brisbane, linking up the various small seaports; but this line is a late construction. The typical railway of Queensland starts from the coast and runs directly inland; and the development of the country follows the same course.

As we follow this inland line, in the wetter districts near the coast we find cattle everywhere. Further west, where the rainfall grows less, there are more sheep; but the area of considerable rainfall is much greater than in the districts further south, owing to the broadening out and irregularity of the easternhighland mass. The whole of this moist area is particularly suited to cattle.

Before the settler can begin either cultivating the soil or raising cattle, there is much preliminary work to be done. A large part of Eastern Queensland is covered with forest or scrub, which must be cleared by cutting down and burning. Here we have a settler starting19operations in a rough camp: he seems to have a difficult task before him. Here he has reached the stage of a20permanent hut, with a small area of cultivated land round it, and beyond, roughly fenced pasture with the remnants of the forest showing in it. Here again are21the cattle feeding in pasture where the trees have been ringbarked and so partly destroyed. To destroy, cut down, and burn trees which may yield valuable timber may seem an extravagant method, but the settler here has even less choice than in the Grafton district of New South Wales, where we saw the same methods employed. The timber is certainly valuable. Here are specimens of the hardwoods which we use for street pavements and railway sleepers, and for other purposes where great strength and endurance are needed; these are the blackbutt22and Queensland Karri pine, and there are many other varieties. The difficulty is to get them to the markets where they are wanted. Here we see one method; a trainload of sleepers is leaving the sawmills,23bound for India; but the railways are few and in many districts the logs must be dragged at a slow rate by bullock teams to the banks of the nearest creek, where they lie perhaps for months until there is enough water to float them down to the larger rivers and so to a seaport. This method is commonly used for the cedar which grows near the coast, and we have already seen it in New South Wales. Except in a few places easily accessible, the natural forest wealth of Queensland is as yet hardly touched.

The railway which we have been following fromRockhampton runs almost along the Tropic. Townsville, our next landing-place, over eight hundred miles north-west of Brisbane, is well within the Tropic, yet in many ways it resembles Rockhampton and Gladstone. From this point another long line runs inland to end on a tributary of the Diamantina, about a hundred miles north-west of the terminus of the line from Rockhampton. We may notice that both these lines, after crossing the wide area of coastal drainage, reach the streams flowing into the Lake Eyre basin. They thus form real links with the interior. After Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville are the most24important ports in the State. Townsville lies on a broad open bay, and the harbour has been made at25great cost by building out long jetties. This has been done because here is the sole outlet for a very large area of country to the west. Here we find more meat and26cattle; and again at Bowen, a small port on a fine natural harbour which we passed further south, they are landing cattle for the local stockbreeders. In short, the whole of this north and north-eastern district is27the home of cattle; cattle running on the cleared scrub lands and pastures of the interior, or fattening on the rich alluvial lands round the creeks near the coast,28where the surroundings, as we see from this picture, are very different.

The coast region itself has something of far greater interest than cattle. There is here a higher uniform temperature than in the uplands, and in some parts a very heavy rainfall; the result is the growth of tropical and sub-tropical plants, and of these plants one of the most interesting to us is sugar. We find sugar-cultivation in patches, all along the coast from Brisbane northwards; and a little even in the extreme north of New South Wales, since the change in climate is very gradual in the coast region. But the most important districts for sugar lie near or inside the Tropic, wherethe cane is grown on the rich alluvial lands of the coast plains and river valleys.

On our voyage to Townsville we passed Mackay, one of the chief centres of sugar-production; outside the Tropic is Bundaberg, where the cane is grown by the aid of irrigation; while in the far north is the important district of Cairns. The fertile land is covered with dense scrub and must be cleared; here is a clearing in progress;29notice that the scrub is different from that which we saw up-country: it is palm. Within two years of planting the shoots the cane is ready for cutting, and in the northern districts we can go on for many years cutting the new canes as they spring up, without the need of re-planting. Here is the cane growing by irrigation in30Bundaberg, one of the drier districts, and here is the reaping of the harvest. We notice that the cutters are31white men. In the early days of sugar, the cultivation was on large estates, each manufacturing its sugar in its own mill. The heavy work was done by Kanakas, imported from the islands of the neighbouring Pacific. This is no longer allowed, and the cane is grown more and more on small farms, by white labour. The growers then sell it to a central mill, where the cane is crushed and the juice extracted. Some of the mills are owned by the small farmers on the co-operative principle, but more often the miller has nothing to do with the growing of the crop. Here we see a trainload32of canes bound for the mill. There is now a Government bounty given for sugar produced entirely by white labour, and it seems to have been proved that, on the small farming system, it can be grown thus and show a good profit. But there are other and more attractive occupations for white people in Queensland, and though the whole coast, right round to the Gulf of Carpentaria, is suitable for sugar, it does not seem likely in the near future to become a large industry in a White Australia.

Sugar is one of the most interesting and valuable of the tropical products of the coast region; but many others are grown, some for the market, others hardly beyond the experimental stage. Let us look33at some of these. Here at Woombye are pineapples and bananas growing; and on the Johnstone River34huge crates of bananas are being shipped for the markets in the towns further south. At Kuranda, on35the Barron River, is a large coffee plantation where we may see the bushes growing and follow the berry as it is dried and husked. Here we notice the36pruning of the coffee bush, and here is a fine specimen with the pruning completed. Not far away, in the37State Nursery at Kamerunga, we find all kinds of tropical plants growing side by side. The nursery is an official experiment ground, since the Government is anxious to test the possibilities of the region for all kinds of economic plants. We walk down a fine38avenue of palms and visit the quarter where they are experimenting with rubber trees. Here is a large39plantation of the trees, and here we see the method of tapping. In a corner we come on a curious African40rubber tree, in which the juice exudes, not from the bark, but from the fruit. More prosaic, but none the41less useful, are the fibre plants, such as sisal hemp, of which we have a fine specimen here. Cotton-growing42has also been attempted on a small scale, and the Commonwealth Government provides a bounty for its encouragement. The main difficulty is the high cost of labour for its cultivation. Here we see the picking43of the cotton. We may gain some idea from these gardens of the great variety of tropical and sub-tropical plants, all of which will grow well on some part of this northern coast. The only need is labour to clear the scrub and make full use of the fertile alluvial soil and the warm rains.

Clearing is very necessary in this region since thebush grows with great luxuriance. By travelling inland a few miles from Cairns we may find a picture44of the bush in its natural state. The coastal plain south of Cairns is very narrow, for in the background, a short distance inland, are various mountain ranges such as the Bellenden Ker range, said to be the highest45in Queensland. Only twenty miles from Cairns, in the foothills of one of these ranges, the little Barron River comes tumbling down in rapids and falls, amid46some of the finest scenery in Australia. Here is the river a short distance above the falls; and here are the47falls themselves from above and below. The railway, following the course of the river, brings us to the48little township of Atherton. Here is the main street. We notice here a Chinese joss-house; this may serve49to remind us that there are other immigrants besides the Kanakas in this northern region of whom account50must be taken by the advocates of a White Australia. The Chinese have already spread all over the Malay51region to the north, and might equally occupy tropical Australia if special measures were not adopted to check their immigration.

In the country round Atherton we have all kinds of typical bush scenery. At one spot we pass giant fig-trees overhanging the road; next we enter the52denser bush. We find lakes in the bush, of which the chief is Lake Eachem, which we have seen before. Everything suggests warmth and moisture. The rivers, lakes, and natural vegetation of this region, together with the fertile soil in the low-lying strip between the mountains and the sea, give us a picture of the conditions which prevail along the greater part of the Queensland coast. Here is a tropical garden, typical53of the coast. Similar conditions extend right across the northern edge of the Australian continent.

We have seen that the coast strip at Cairns is very narrow: behind the mountain edge we shall find therivers flowing west into the Gulf of Carpentaria. As we travel westward we enter rather a different type of country. There is less rain than on the coast, but more than in the interior further south. We must remember that in this part of Queensland we are getting near the zone where a heavy monsoon rain sweeps in from the Pacific in summer. All this country is well fitted for cattle; but it is as yet thinly peopled, since there are few railways, so that it lacks an outlet to the sea. The existing railways are intended to serve the mining districts, since the gold of this region has been the chief attraction up to the present time. There are goldfields scattered all along the eastern side of the highlands. On the Cooktown line is Palmerville; on the Townsville line are Charters Towers and the Cape River field; near Rockhampton is Mount54Morgan, one of the most famous mines in the past; it has given rise to a large town which we see here. Here, too, we see the crushing of the ore, preliminary55to the chemical extraction of the gold. Near the coast, north of Brisbane, is the Gympie field, and in the far north, near the Gulf of Carpentaria, is Croydon. There are many smaller fields, and we can easily see the connexion between the railways and the gold. There are other minerals, too, in this area,56so we see a whole township based on tin, and another growing up round a copper mine.57

Some of the railways have done more than develop the mining areas; they have been pushed westward into the pastoral country on the long inland slopes of Queensland. We have already followed the southern lines for some distance, and we must now carry our exploration beyond the railway zone, for a very large area in the State is as yet quite untouched by railways. This area will be greatly reduced by the execution of the scheme contemplated by the State Government for linking up all the railways both alongthe coast and inland. First there is the country in the basin of the Flinders River, round the southern end of the Gulf of Carpentaria; this is being opened up slowly from the sea. It contains much good pasture land, and already feeds a large number of cattle. Further south is the drier country where the streams drain towards the Lake Eyre basin; this is part of the Rolling Plains which occupy West and South-West Queensland and the north-west corner of New South Wales. This area is most interesting owing to the possibility of obtaining water from beneath the ground.

The rainfall is somewhat scanty, and in the dry weather the creeks lose themselves in the desert sands or become mere strings of waterholes. There may be enough food for the cattle or sheep, but they must have water also, and this can only be found underground. In the higher country to the east, where the rains are relatively heavy, are large areas where the water sinks readily into the ground, as the rock is porous. A long way below the surface it is held up by impervious strata of clay or rock and begins to creep away downhill towards the west and the Gulf of Carpentaria. To the west the surface also becomes impermeable, so that the water is confined between the two layers, and can be reached anywhere by boring through the top covering. Sometimes in these boreholes the water does not rise as far as the surface of the ground, and58so must be pumped up; but more often it spouts out with great force, as we see it here. Some of these artesian wells give over a million gallons a day, and penetrate for three or four thousand feet into the earth. The water is often warm and charged with salts; but this does not seem to harm the cattle. The water from the bore is run off into trenches extending perhaps for miles, so that there is plenty of room for the cattle to drink. By the aid of these wells cattle can live in the country all the year round; and even thedesert stock-route from South Australia to Queensland can be kept open in the dry season. The utilisation of a simple geological fact is changing the whole face of the country.

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