Our last day came all too soon, warm and sunny, when we made the short journey from Cottesloe Beach to Fremantle. The war news seemed more real, when we saw a German tramp held up in the harbour, with the guns of the forts trained on her. The big Orient liner was lying alongside, and we boarded her with many regrets at what we were leaving behind, for we had to say good-bye to many friends, and our cabin was filled with flowers, sweet violets, and the heavy scented boronia, of which Western Australia is so proud. At last we started on the four days’ voyage to Adelaide, and it was not till we reached Northern Queensland that we again encountered that atmosphere of primitive freshness and novelty, that we were leaving behind. So we left Western Australia, with its warm-hearted, generous people, its vast, almost untouched resources of primeval forest, and rich soil, its social problems, on which the visitor is incompetent to pronounce, problems acute in the old world, making themselves felt even here, especially that seemingly irreconcilable one of the interests of the Labour man and the Liberal. Irreconcilable so it seemed to us, for the Labour man may be clear-sighted, but he cannot afford to be far-sighted, because, as he himself would put it, he can’t afford to wait.
PART II
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
CHAPTER VI
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
In a poem written long ago by Bret Harte the opening of the Pacific Railroad which joined East to West was commemorated in an imagined dialogue between the engines that met midway on the track.
What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching—head to head,
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?