CHAPTER I
JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START
For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide—
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried!
STARTING on a trip to Australia gives one for the moment the feeling expressed in Kipling’s lines. The “Never-Never Land,” as it is called, is so far away, the voyage is so long, and thoughts of the to-be-discovered continent are so full of dreary anticipation! The vast stretches of desert, the monotonous reaches of forests where the trees shed their bark and the silence is broken only by the harsh cry of the “laughing jackass,” or kookooburra bird, the fearful dryness, and the awful heat—these things of which one reads so much in the books about the country do not make pleasant pictures in the mind of the traveller.
One can go to Australia in three weeks on a comfortable steamer from Seattle, San Francisco, or Vancouver; my own trip, however, was taken after a long, hot stay in the Philippines and a leisurely drifting from there past Borneo and down the coast of Cochin-China to Singapore and Java. At Batavia I caught a little tramp steamer bound for the East on a route passing through the Dutch East Indies to Torres Strait, Thursday Island, and New Guinea, and thence going southward inside the Great Barrier Reef to Brisbane in Queensland.
The itinerary looked interesting, the voyage venturesome, and as I walked on board my heart sang. A day or so later it wept. The meat was atrocious, the bread soggy, the rancid butter oil, and the water lukewarm and bitter. As a whole, my fellow voyagers were no better than the food. For the most part they were a motley crowd of dirty Hindoos and Malays, with the flotsam and jetsam, blacks, browns, and whites found scattered throughout the islands.
Moreover, two of our Moslem passengers developed a fever, which led to our being quarantined at some of the ports. We were twenty-five long days on the Equator, and it was only when the cool breezes off the Barrier Reef blew new ozone into our lungs that life again seemed worth the living.
But from the day I landed in Brisbane and started off on my journeyings in the “lonely continent” to the day on which I once more turned my face toward home I had no regrets that I had come. Australia was full of surprises and of interest for me; the beauties of New Zealand and the air of its mountains soon drove the evil out of my soul and put new life into my bones. I decided that here was a case where the desire “for to admire and for to see” that had sent me off to the other side of the world had done some good to me after all. I trust that you, too, may be glad that I went and that I have set down here the story of what I saw.
The few rivers of Australia are short and mostly unnavigable. In summer many of the streams dry up entirely or form a series of detached pools. The one big river system is the Murray, on the eastern side of the continent.
In some dense Australian wilds are towering tree ferns such as disappeared from the rest of the earth before the Coal Age and are now seen elsewhere only in the fossilized remains of prehistoric times.