Let us follow the Swan, now become the Avon River, inland. First we come to Newcastle, where there are many orange orchards in the broad valley; then we pass the township of Northam, where we meet a native woman 34 on the road, and finally we reach York. From one of the surrounding hills we look down on a broad expanse of 35 plain, dotted with farmhouses, and with a background of hills in the distance. There is a flour mill which 36 might be in our own Yorkshire, and a very English-looking church on the sloping bank above the river. 37 All looks settled and civilised. On the other hand, the King’s Head hotel is entirely primitive, and carries 38 us back to the days of the early settlers, as it is one of the oldest buildings in the State. As we cross the bridge we notice that the trees are standing in the water, for the river is in flood.
We have here a country full of English place-names, and with scenery which often reminds us of England; but at the same time we find wheat and oranges growing side by side, and trees in fruit and flower in the winter. This suggests something very different from our own climate. We must remember that Perth is in latitude 32° S. and that this district therefore corresponds to Egypt or Morocco. It is a land where frosts are unknown in the lowlands and valleys near the sea, and where the summers are hot and dry, though tempered by the sea breezes. Most of the rain falls in the winter, which is therefore the growing time; we have already noticed the Avon in flood. Even in the winter there is plenty of sun, as the rain falls largely in heavy showers at night.
Western Australia: Rainfall.
If we travel eastward from York we shall soon find 39 a change in the face of the country, as the rainfall decreases quickly towards the interior. But for the present we will keep within the zone of moderate rainfall, not far from the coast, and continue our journey southwards. Much of the land round Perth has been cleared for agriculture, though it was formerly covered with forest. Beginning north of Perth, and stretching southwards at a distance of twenty to thirty miles from the coast, is a long belt of timber-country, marking the zone of heaviest rainfall. This belt broadens out and fills the whole peninsula in the south-west corner, between Flinders Bay and Geographe Bay, and finally disappears a few miles to the north-east of Albany. The dense forest clothes the western face of the plateau, and thins out eastward to open scrub country with scattered gum trees of various kinds. It consists in the main of Jarrah, with some blocks of Karri in the south and south-west.
Jarrah is a very hard red-coloured wood which is useful for jetties, railway sleepers and all other work where there is great exposure to damp and weather. We may often walk over it in the streets of our cities, as it makes an excellent pavement. Here we see the appearance of the original tree: it is tall, perhaps a 40 hundred feet high, with a trunk a yard or more thick and a dark-grey furrowed bark.
With the Jarrah is found the Karri, of much the same character but less durable. It is one of the finest and tallest trees of the Australian forest. Its bark is yellowish white, and peels off, leaving the tree clean, so that the Karri is sometimes called the white gum. The tree sometimes grows to a height of three hundred 41 feet, and is far too large to handle; while even the smaller specimens need a whole team to haul a single log. So that, although there is a very large area of forest land, we can understand that cutting only goes on within easy reach of one of the short branch railway lines running down to the sea. The forests of Western Australia have recently been estimated to contain two hundred and twenty million tons of valuable timber, worth about three hundred million pounds sterling.
Where the forest thins out eastward the red gum is one of the most useful trees, as it is spreading and 42 branched, and so gives more shade than the other gum trees. This is important for the stockowner in a dry, hot country.
We have already seen something of the agricultural district round York; and we shall find little difference as we follow the railway southwards to Albany, keeping always about a hundred miles from the coast. There are the same wheatfields and sheep and occasional orchards; it is not very different from the country round Perth, except that it is rather cooler as we travel southwards. In the summer, especially on the eastern edge of this belt, it is very dry and parched; but after the winter rains, though there is too little water for trees, the flowers and grasses spring up everywhere, especially everlasting flowers which grow in great profusion, as we see from the picture before us. 43
So we have a coast belt associated with timber, and a parallel belt inland where agriculture is developing along the track of the railway. The southern terminus 44 of the railway is Albany, on King George’s Sound, one of the best harbours of the Australian continent. 45 Albany is a fortified coaling port, and is likely to grow in importance with the organisation of Australian defence in the future. This seems a small corner on the map, yet the area available for agriculture is considerably larger than the total area under cultivation in Great Britain; while beyond it, in the region of lessening rainfall, is a wide belt suited for sheep-raising. Further eastward still, beyond this belt, we enter another type of country. The railway from Northam Junction carries us across the dry country and through Southern Cross to the mining centre of Coolgardie. A little further on, at Kalgoorlie, it turns northward, to end at Laverton, about four hundred miles from Perth and the same distance from the sea to the south. This is the limit of that part of West Australian settlement which is based on gold.