Apart from its natural beauty and engineering achievement, Mundaring Weir, or at least its neighbourhood, has a peculiar interest for the zoologist. It is the home of a certain little black animal. To the uninitiated its appearance is something between that of a small black slug and a caterpillar, but to the scientific man it is of paramount importance, because its legs are not real legs. Peripatus is its name, and it lives under stones. Only recently, however, the secluded and innocent life of the unfortunate peripatus has been rudely interrupted, and he was in fact well-nigh exterminated by the visit to Perth of a learned society all in search of specimens. So that henceforth the peripatus will be more esteemed than ever in the scientific world.
We said it was the gold rush that created, or at least accelerated the agricultural development of Western Australia. The influx of population, with the direct aim of gold-digging, brought in its train a dependent and attendant crowd of settlers to minister to its needs by the provision of agricultural produce, meat, flour, butter, and vegetables. Moreover, many of those who had come out to seek gold in the mines, sought it instead in the fruits of the earth, in grain, and in hay, in fruit and corn-growing. In the extreme north, known as the Kimberley country, cattle are raised; south of that, in the south-west pastoral district, sheep are the principal stock. The wheat belt, as it is called, is a strip of country stretching about five hundred miles from the Murchison River in the north, to the south coast east of Albany. But the limits of the wheat-growing area cannot at present be defined, the riverless districts of Australia are not desert in the sense that the Sahara is a desert; strips throughout the so-called desert are pastoral country on which grass will grow, supporting a more or less sparse vegetation. After rain the desert is clothed with vegetation, and the permanent plants depend on small local supplies of subterranean water. But there is besides a vast artesian storage. These so-called desert areas are shrinking every year, and the “wheat-line” is encroaching upon and absorbing them as improved methods of agriculture prevail. Thus at present farmers “are getting remunerative crops from regions of low rainfall and light sandy soil, which would have been looked upon as chimerical a decade ago.”[8]
The land laws in Western Australia are framed on easy terms for the settler. The holdings are limited to two thousand acres of agricultural land, including a homestead farm, or the equivalent of five thousand acres in grazing land, but the husband or wife of the holder may select an additional thousand acres of agricultural land, or two thousand five hundred acres of grazing land. A homestead farm of 160 acres can be taken up by new settlers on payment of about £9 in fees, with an additional 30s. for a Crown grant at the end of seven years. Larger grants may be had at from 10s. an acre, payable in twenty years without interest. Certain conditions attach to land purchase. The holder of a homestead farm of 160 acres, for instance, must reside there for six months in each of the first five years; he must expend four shillings an acre within the first two years, and a total of fourteen shillings an acre in seven years, of which total only £30 is allowed to be deducted in value for the cost of his house. Half the land must be fenced within five years, the whole within seven years. One hundred to a thousand acres of “Conditional Purchase Land,” at from 10s. an acre, may be taken up. It is paid for in forty half-yearly instalments, which, during the first three years, need not exceed 3d. an acre. Conditions of residence, relating to improvements and fencing are, of course, attached to these holdings. Conditional purchase by direct payment is made on equally easy terms.
ORCHARD AND HOMESTEAD AT BRIDGETOWN.
We spent a Sunday in Perth, which was devoted partly to attending the cathedral service, and partly to visiting a native compound some distance away. Perth appeared to be a church-going place, and its people, Prayer Book in hand, and in their Sunday clothes, were setting off to their various places of worship, of which the neighbourhood affords a great variety. The service in the cathedral was well attended, and was conducted with that dignified simplicity characteristic of the best traditions of English church worship; and the familiar words of the liturgy seemed more deeply filled with meaning in this far-off country. The singing of the choir was an admirable performance, and would compare favourably with that of most English churches.
After the service we were to lunch with the State Premier, and his car was waiting for us. The chauffeur was not the uniformed and correct personage, who drives our cars at home, but, as befits a democratic country, a genial and friendly soul, who having bade us welcome to the car, whirled us up to Mount Lawley, throwing occasional information at us over his shoulder. 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.
It was on this occasion that we saw for the first time those formidable, but insignificant-looking Australian pests, the white ant. We had gone out to see our host’s collection of wallabies, large, brown, rat-like creatures, with the hind legs of a rabbit, and we expressed a wish to see also the insect that could eat everything except iron and jarrah wood. Australians cannot bear to disappoint a guest. They would regard it as a breach of hospitality, and an exhaustive search was made at once, till some white ants were discovered under a wooden tub of plants—tiny white specks hurrying away from the light.
The road to the Native Compound, for which we started after lunch, led through the King’s Park or Government Reserve. Near all large townships the Government has wisely set apart a tract of country to remain public property. These are not parks in our sense of the word, for they are not laid out in trim lawns and flowerbeds, or at least only a small fraction of them; but the bush is left in its wild state, a sanctuary for birds and animals. In the King’s Park red carriage drives lead through the bush, at one point giving place to lawns and flowering trees, and commanding a fine view of the Swan River and of Perth, whose extent we for the first time realised. We were impressed by the prosperous air of the crowds, whom the fine warm Sunday afternoon had brought out; there were none among them who did not look well-to-do. But our afternoon was only beginning. The Native Compound lay in the direction of Guildford, a village about ten miles off, a settlement of some antiquity compared to Perth. The way out into the country was crowded with innumerable buggies taking whole families for an airing, and a haze of red dust hung over the road.
We passed the race-course, as indispensable to an Australian town as the post office, and the football ground, where we paused for a moment to look on at a vigorous match between “the jockeys” and the “bread-carriers.” Farther on people were playing on a newly laid-out golf-course, driving off from tees on which the unfailing kerosene tin did duty for sand-boxes, though one would hardly have thought it necessary to collect sand in boxes in Western Australia. Turning up a narrow, muddy road, we passed a lot of small nursery gardens, “Chinamen’s gardens,” with the Chinamen busy in them, but the activity of the Chinaman in Australia is hardly more popular than that of the white ant. We ploughed and splashed our ways along this side track, for the road was not made, till it ended abruptly in a gate. Now inured to the methods of the Australian motorist, we almost expected the car to take the gate in its stride, but having opened it, we ran up the side of a grassy bank on to a sort of plateau, girdled by the bush, with what looked like a very low-class gipsy encampment in one corner, not aristocratic gipsies with vans, but dirty little round tents like those that were formerly dotted about the banks of the Thames, near London, in haymaking time, but which have vanished before a too inquisitorial County Council.