Edwin Sharpe Grew

“ One always thinks of a harbour as a round place full of shipping, with crowded, dirty wharfs. Sydney Harbour is quite different from this; it is a series of creeks running up into the land, its different arms separated by wooded hills, whose trees are rapidly disappearing in a tide of villas. Wherever you are in Sydney, you are never far away from some fresh aspect of the harbour.
Our car ran on to a steam-ferry, already crowded with cars and carts, climbed the bank on the other side, and passing a terrace of houses, like an old-fashioned London suburb, drew up at a garden gate. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 more settled, more homogeneous,131 more cosmopolitan than elsewhere in Australia, so that here, if anywhere, one loses the sense of a new country, which is at the same time part of its charm. The women and girls in Melbourne are also prettier, and more prettily dressed than elsewhere, and it makes a cult of charming-looking, elderly, white-haired matrons, wearing the dignity of their years becomingly. Not that pretty women and girls are not to be found everywhere, but Melbourne has a colder, more bracing climate, and is more in touch with the outside world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is on the southern shores of this side of the harbour that the commercial life of Sydney is centred, the great and busy city with all its thronging wharves. On the northern shores are the picturesque houses of the well-to-do residents; for Sydney is also a pleasure city, and the land-locked waters of the upper reaches of the harbour are delightful for sailing, rowing, fishing, and bathing, while in the immediate neighbourhood are the popular surf-bathing beaches of Manly and Coogee. ”

“ Unless the faculty of sleeping in a train is cultivated, there is no enjoyment for the Australian traveller, for he must always journey scores of miles to get anywhere, and the country, generally speaking, varies little in character. On this occasion we awoke to find ourselves in a sort of Swiss scenery, with range on range of blue hills. This endless vista of gum-covered hill after gum-covered hill made it easy to see why for years the Blue Mountains were the despair of pioneers, who, surmounting one range, found another in front of them exactly the same. ”

“ That is what Melbourne is. It is a city, a city where money is made, and big business goes on. It is to Melbourne and to Collins Street that you must come if you are to talk to the men who are planning and financing and ordering the Australia of the future.
There is a Melbourne of another kind, just as there are many Londons. There is Melbourne of the University, nestling in its gardens and secure in the strongest foundation a University can have, the solid research of its professors and teachers. ”

“ But in Australia the public men are not photographed; they are known to everybody and are spoken to by everybody. The only exceptions are the Governors. If they are men of great ability, a limited divinity hedges them, but they are the only people thus fenced in, and the fence can be seen through if they are not first-rate. If there are no big-wigs in Australia, the land is knee-deep in critics.
In the absence of any deeply separated social circles in Melbourne, there is a social life of unbounding vitality and capacity for enjoyment. ”

“ And one cannot help an apprehension lest in years to come, the tree-clothed heights and headlands may not all be whity-brown with the houses of citizens. Doubtless on the side of the harbour opposite to Circular Quay another Sydney will spring up which will be to the old one what Brooklyn is to New York, and will have its own factories and its own Mayor. One can hope only that it will grow up maintaining some idea of public parks—which ought all to come down to the water, and fend off the encroachments of houses—and of town-planning. ”

“ Brisbane is a most beautifully situated town, set among hills washed by the river, which runs into the sea eighteen miles away. Its many handsome public buildings are fronted by gardens full of tropical vegetation, its broad arcaded streets, filled with people, prosperous-looking like all Australians. ”

“ The cliffs of Rottnest Island, showing yellowish in the bright sunshine, with the white needle of the lighthouse sharply defined are the first sight of land as ships approach West Australia.
The half an hour’s railway journey to Perth runs through other little garden suburbs, for all Australian towns straggle out for many miles into the country, and cover a very large extent of ground. Space is unlimited, and nobody’s domain large or small, need elbow that of his neighbour. The little train on its narrow gauge railway rattles past roads of one-storied houses, standing on their piles ”

“ The small coral islands are innumerable, and often quite flat, so that only a practised eye could discern their neighbourhood at night, even with glasses.
A great charm of travelling by sea is that it brings one into intimate relationship with all sorts and conditions of men. People who stay at home have a tendency to get into sets, to associate too exclusively with people of their own kind, whose points of view, standards of life and habits are all more or less the same as their own, and so they settle into grooves and get dull, and their minds become inelastic. ”

“ Leaving the picture gallery, a long corridor leads to the free library, and Melbourne is justly proud of its beautiful and luxurious reading-room, in every way worthy of the chief city of a great democratic country. ”

“ The cloudy, hazy distances, a certain crispness in the air, as on a fine March day at home, the grass that grows freely everywhere, and suburbs with such names as Knightsbridge, all deepened the sense of familiarity. We shall always see Adelaide in imagination as we looked down on her that early spring day, with all her orchards a delicate pale pink mist of almond blossom, and the soft grey distances that felt like home. ”

“ After the degree ceremony we went on to the Town Hall, where the Lady Mayoress was giving a tea-party. Mayors and Mayoresses are very important people in Australia; they are lavish in their entertainment of strangers, and are the centre not only of the civic life of a town, but often of its social life as well, the two things being usually indistinguishable. The Melbourne Town Hall is worthy of a great city that is the seat of government, and the rallying point of all the different phases of life on the continent. ”

“ 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. ”