Edwin Sharpe Grew

“ The fiery mist would be giving out heat all about it, sending out heat-waves as a fire or a red-hot poker will do. The red-hot poker cools; so, too, would the fiery nebula. Then the nebula would begin to condense; not quite in the same way that a cloud of steam does, for it would be whirling all the time, and its fiery particles would be all trying to fall inwards, just as anything dropped from our hands tends to fall towards the centre of the earth. As this whirling mass of gas condensed some great masses of it would become detached, and would begin to enjoy separate existences of their own. ”

“ Mount Lawley is a pleasant suburb of Perth, if one can talk of suburbs where all is suburban; it lies upon the slopes of the Swan River, and commands an inspiriting view of the city, spreading out far and wide over its hills in vigorous new growth. This Australian household in which we were guests had a charmingly patriarchal atmosphere, for three generations sat at table: a delightful, picturesque old couple, who had come out to Australia in those hard and grinding early days, before a colonist had his bread buttered, and his house built for him immediately on his arrival. ”

“ As the countless myriads of the animals of the sea die, the shells with which they are covered, or the bones which form their framework, fall continually to the bottom of the oceanic gulfs in which they dwell. Then the ocean floor is covered with the remains of tiny animals incomparably more numerous than the stars of the sky; and this grey slimy ooze of organic matter hardens by pressure into sedimentary rock. In the course of ages, when the slow decline of the water lays it bare, it may become part of the land on which men dwell. ”

“ We had tea at a hotel, whose verandah overlooked woods falling steeply away at the back. It was a charming little place, and we should have liked to stay there, forgetting that in Australia there is no soft, lingering twilight, but dusk follows immediately, darkness very swiftly, on the setting of the sun. Sometimes there is an afterglow, a luminous orange light suffuses the darkness, and the heavy masses of gum trees stand out inky black on the horizon. Such an afterglow illuminated our return journey from Mundaring Weir to Perth. ”

“ After each explosion and outflow the earth's crust would grow a little thicker. All this time, and for long succeeding ages, the earth was attracting to itself, as a magnet attracts iron filings, all the small bodies which it encountered on its path round the Sun. These little rocks or masses of matter, some great and some small, would each add something to the size of the earth, and, by the shock of collision with it, something to the earth's heat—just as a bullet flattening itself against a target melts in the heat of collision. ”

“ No tropical country, perhaps no country at all which men inhabit, except Patagonia, conveys this impression of the unaltered primeval world. But one could hardly expect a locomotive, a thing of steel and steam, to dwell on this aspect of the land of its adoption. Rather would it say that in Western Australia you could see at its earliest and best, man the pioneer, making for himself a clearing, a home, a community in the wild, blazing out the trails, watering the desert, laying a toll upon the elements. Here he had built a town growing like a city of enchantment in the bush ”

“ The Moon is therefore one of the younger members of the Solar System. But no other catastrophe, either before or since, has occurred on the earth to compare with its prodigious birth. Five thousand million cubic miles of material left the earth's surface never again to return to it. Whether it all left at once or whether the action was prolonged we do not know, but we may try in vain to imagine the awful uproar and fearful volcanic phenomena exhibited when a planet was cleft in twain and a new moon was born into the Solar System. ”

“ No wonder that with such inducements to linger in the neighbourhood of a town, men should shrink from the harder, more vigorous life up-country. Yet it is “up-country” men that Australia wants, to clear, sow, and till her rich, fertile soil; with enterprise and energy to win certain fortune, and courage to face the initial hardships and loneliness, which bring their own reward.
With all her natural advantages Western Australia’s development is only a matter of the last twenty years. Like most of the rest of the continent, she has an inhospitable and forbidding coast. ”

“ People find themselves suddenly thrown to the earth, the ground swept from under their feet. Sometimes the rolling waves of earth are absent, and the movement is a rude quiver, rapidly vibrating in every direction—twisting, contorting, wrenching the ground as if in a determined effort to shake it into dust. Sometimes the most pronounced motion is up and down, as if the earth beneath were being hammered with giant strokes. ”

“ THE LAND OF THE UNLATCHED DOOR Opposite to us was Australia. During the long days of the voyage across the bleak South Indian Ocean it had seemed no more than a vague area on a map, small, as all countries and even continents are, compared to the interminable stretches of the sea. But the voyage was ended now, and Australia, first no more than a blur on the horizon, and then solidifying into a shore with green trees, had now become resolved into an island with a lighthouse; and now into a harbour with wharves and quays and a background of houses behind the sheds and derricks. ”

“ Looking down the opening gorge, we saw the valley of the Barron River, for almost its whole course, winding to the sea, a pale streak below the dark slopes of the mountains. The train stopped within sound of the thunder of the Barron Falls. The swirling water takes its magnificent plunge in tumultuous clouds of white froth to the gorge below, where rare butterflies hover, and white cockatoos flutter among the tops of the gum trees. ”

“ It is naturally painful to conclude that the Moon is and always has been deprived of those features of existence which we deem the nobler; that it has never known the stir of air or water or the higher life of beings who inherit the profit of experience, and thereby climb the way that has led upward to man. That these large gifts have been denied to the nearest companion of the earth has its lesson for the naturalist. ”

“ But man's mind and will have enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and to increase and multiply as no other animal without change of form, and without submitting to the terrible axe of selection wielded by ruthless circumstance over all other living things on this globe. ”

“ And for the last time let us urge upon travellers to Australia to take far less luggage than they can possibly imagine they will want. Let them bear in mind, in the first place, the great inconvenience of transferring small luggage, when there are no porters, the hideous nuisance of packing and unpacking if they have to do it for themselves; the very much simpler standard of dress that prevails in a new country, where even in the capital people are contented to go out to dinners and theatres by tram; well-to-do people dressed in elaborate cloaks and satin shoes. ”

“ After the time when the great overflows of lava took place, spreading over continents and sometimes seas, there was an era when the explosions and outbursts began to diminish in violence, and the world slowly settled down to conditions something like those which we see in our own day. The seas were forming; there was rainfall and summer and winter on the earth. The rains and the winds, the summer heats and winter snows were more violent than now, and the volcanic activity of which we have spoken was much more fierce than anything of which mankind has any recollection. ”

“ COMPULSORY TRAINING AND SOCIAL LIFE IN ADELAIDE Adelaide, when we reached it, was like the rest of the Australian continent, celebrating the declaration of war by a tremendous outburst of patriotism; the whole place fluttered with little flags, Union Jacks were on every bicycle or cart or motor-car, loyal crowds were assembling at street corners. We in England have no conception of the depths of feeling that our fellow-countrymen in Australia have for “home.” ”

“ How great that pull is may be dimly gathered from the reflection that though the earth is spinning at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, nothing is ever shaken off. The oceans are not shaken off. They cling. But why is it that they are not equally distributed all over the face of the earth? If a map of the earth be examined, or still better a globe with the oceans and continents correctly drawn on it, it will be found that there is a great mass of land all lying grouped together on one side of the earth, and a great basin of waters on the other. ”

“ The suburbs are only scattered bungalows dotted among the green, with their flowers and paw-paw trees and palms. Patches of eucalyptus scrub remain here and there, and rough roads connect them with the main road, up which the tram climbs steeply. After its terminus the road still climbs the hill and we climbed with it, till we came to a green lane, where was a rare butterfly with wonderful metallic blue wings fluttering above a yellow-berried duranta bush, and where we heard a laughing jackass, and watched some untidy-looking magpies. ”

“ If the labour of the geologist were concerned merely with the former changes of the earth's surface—how sea and land have changed places, how rivers have altered their courses, how valleys have been dug out, and how mountains have been carved, how plains have been spread out, and how all these things have been written on the framework of the earth—he would still feel one very great want, the want of living interest. ”

“ Could this be a sheep farm? Where were the countless thousands which ought to have filled the landscape—as they do in the photographs? We had driven over rolling downs of short grass, through clearings of trees, and by tracks which made the car leap like a tiger as it cleared the ruts, but where were the sheep? We had seen other things that filled us with delight, a flock of wild cockatoos—and though that may seem nothing to you who read, let us add that there is an inexplicable thrill in seeing wild anything that one has never before beheld except captive. ”

“ The Australians themselves do not seem to know very much more about the Northern Territory than the average Englishman. They speak of it as an arid wilderness, much in the same way as they regard Western Australia; yet, to the visitor from home, it is the beauty and the wildness of Western and Northern Australia, that make an appeal far more profound than that of the busy, civilised, and comparatively populous southern and eastern states. With all their differences they are still too much like home to stir the imagination. ”

“ Now when there is a depression in the barometer that means that the weight of air above the barometer is less than it was before, though it is not so great a difference that human beings could tell it, unless it were accompanied by other signs. But the earth can tell it, and the mere fall of the barometer, owing to changes of the air, will make the earth tremble or quiver slightly, as if it were a jelly. We cannot perceive it; but the delicate seismometers can; and when a storm is coming to Japan or to California from the Pacific, the instruments show that the earth feels the passage of it. ”

“ In a photograph it shows not unlike Europe, but the heavy opaque look of the gums seen massed together at a little distance does not resemble anything on this continent, nor does the rather sad, almost dun-coloured effect of the grey eucalyptus, near at hand, nor the translucent atmosphere, the clarity of light, the brilliancy of sun, that makes a London winter seem a thing of abysmal gloom following on those illumined days. ”