PART VQUEENSLAND
CHAPTER XVIBANANA-LAND
Oh Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you—Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring—Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories.Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing.
Oh Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you—Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring—Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories.Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing.
Oh Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you—Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring—Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories.Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing.
Oh Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you—
Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring—
Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories.
Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing.
Thoselines were written by an Australian in exile, for he was with the Australian contingent in the war in South Africa. He is dead now, and he did not long survive the brave soldiers whose epitaph he wrote beginning with those words, which seem, to one who has known Australia only a little, to sum up in a wonderful way the clinging memories of the land. He spoke too of the “blue skies clear beyond the mountain-tops,” and “the dear dun plains where we were bred,” and there are no two sentences which more simply or clearly bring back Australia to the mind. But it is the Australia of the west and the south. When the Hawkesbury River is crossed eastwards, and the flats where the first Cornstalks were raised have been left behind, a new country comes into vision. It is tropicQueensland, whose inhabitants are called Banana-landers, because the banana finds the climate very suitable to its growth.21
Naturally the change is not immediately apparent in the long, long journey by rail. The enchanting cool stretches of the Hawkesbury give place to the ascending grades of the hills; then there are interminable stretches of the dun plains, broken by lengths almost as long of gaunt forest, sometimes dead wood. Then the plateau of fine pasture of the Darling Downs, and the descent warmer and moister and greener as you go into the land of the banana and the pine. It is also, if you strike far enough north, the land of the prickly pear.
Railway journeying is not a bad way of seeing a country if you have no better. One can gain an impression of China such as nothing can obliterate by taking the North China Railway up to Harbin; and people have written books of impressions of Java on the strength of the five days’ journey which can be made from the portof Sourabaya, through crumbling Djokjokarta and the wondrous Javanese highlands to Batavia. So something of the nature of Queensland can be arrived at by that long night and half-a-day journey by rail, though if we were asked what was the chief impression which, at this distance of time, is left on our minds, we should answer that it was one of wood and pasture lying waiting for men and money—vast resources which need the spade and the axe and the drill—and more railway.
Side by side would be quite another impression, one quite without significance. It was that of the little township, one of many, where we stopped for supper—a meal engulfed in all possible haste, and yet in the midst of it there suddenly appeared on the platform of the hall, which on ordinary occasions is probably used as a cinema theatre, the Mayor. We were, as we should again explain, members of a large travelling party, and the opportunity was one which the Mayor could not resist. He bade us welcome to —— (the name is forgotten), and added what delight it was to see among us so many happy faces.... Then having had our meal cut short by the oration, we hastened back to the waiting special.
Queensland is full of townships like that—townships which are springing into towns. Sometimesthey seem to consist of a few boards knocked together with telegraph wire; at a later stage they have added a handsome Town Hall, a Catholic cathedral in red brick, a humbler Church of England one ... but most of them retain the suburb of wooden-frame houses. They do not spring out of the bush in the same way that the towns of Western Australia do; perhaps because the clearings have been made larger. But everywhere you seem to see right back to the beginnings of the place, when a few people settled there and lived there; and gradually added this and that to it, till Townsville, or Maryborough, became to them the finest place in the world—because they called it home. Even Brisbane, with its broad bank-building-fronted Queen Street, retains something of the same aspect.
But Queensland is not its towns. Queensland, if you go but the smallest distance away from them, is the unconquered wild; the land where the blacks still signal with fires; where the forests smoulder and blaze for days in the burning sun; a land where it is possible still to be an explorer. Only a few days ago we were speaking to a professor in a laboratory in London, who lived ten years in Australia, and mentioned Queensland. His face lit up in a reminiscent gleam. “I oncewent for a holiday on the Queensland coast,” said he, “and we had rare sport. We used to go shark-spearing. It can only be done on a few nights in the year. The season is when the sharks come in to the coast; and it must be moonlight ... and you race along the beach with nothing on, and you can see the sharks in the under curve of the big rollers as they break on the beach. And if you are quick and have the knack you can stab at them from underneath, and they can’t get you. I got two or three, though I was only a learner ... the finest sport ...” His voice trailed away into silence. Our friend the distinguished physiologist had gone from dusty London to a place in a tropic land eleven thousand miles away.
That is Queensland as it seemed to us: a place in which the towns were still additions rather than a part of a land where enchantment and adventure still linger. There is an island on the coast which is quite near a thriving town of meat-packing warehouses, streets full of sun and dust and flies, and it is called Magnetic Island. You can reach the island by a steam launch, and the people of the town often make the trip, and when they get there presumably they have lunch at the boarding-house hotel. It is a wooden building with washing hanging out in the backyardand a dissipated emu stalking among the fowls. A melancholy bird which seems to have come unstuffed. So there is nothing romantic at the outset of a journey to Magnetic Island.
But wait. Twenty paces away from the hotel is a stony path, and the trees have closed in behind you. A hundred yards, and if you strayed away from the path the way would be lost. Dense trees, rock cropping out at times, and no way out. A strange bird calls somewhere in the distance, but it is otherwise very still and stifling. There is a tree covered with yellow flowers, but it has a poisonous look; and if you venture to pluck it a regiment of stinging ants sallies out at you. So you drop it and go on. And here is a tree covered with butterflies, thousands upon thousands of them. And now you come to a mangrove swamp, and if you look down at the roots of the mangroves you will find the rare fish that live half in and half out of the water, and can hop about in the mud. So suddenly you realise that this is an island such as all the adventurers and pirates and wrecked sailors have been cast upon in the romances. Here they would have sought long for water, and perhaps have sought in vain. Here they would have had painful experiences with poisonous berries, and would for many days have had to live on shellfish.Perhaps one day they would have seen ascending smoke behind that rocky ridge, and realised that hostile natives were waiting to fall on them. Long, long they would have waited for help and rescue, and perhaps have left only their whitening bones to tell other mariners in other years that rescue came too late....
If you would add verisimilitude to these fancies you can find it, for on a secluded beach of Magnetic Island lies the skeleton of a ship that was wrecked there. It will lie there for many years to come, for it is worth no one’s while to salve it. But to one who saw it a year ago it was a priceless relic, for it proved to him that even now in Queensland the old romance, the old adventure, and the spirit of them still linger in the lands that lie within our reach beyond the seas.