Rambles in Australia

by Edwin Sharpe Grew; Marion Sharpe Grew

This is what the Engines said

Unreported and unread.

Then Bret Harte went on to record the puffing phrases in which each engine described what it brought from the land of its base: the engine from the East, speaking of the shores where the Atlantic beats, and the broad lands of forest and of prairie; and the engine from the West rejoining that it brought to the meeting the storied East:—

All the Orient, all Cathay

Find through me the shortest way.

That parable will find a new application (will have found, perhaps, we should say) in the meeting of the engines on the track which is to join Western Australia to South Australia, Perth and Albany to Adelaide. One might speculate on what the engine from the West would say on this occasion. It might breathe a few words of the Orient, and would be entitled to add others concerning Afric’s sunwashed lands, for it is not to be denied that the bulk of the liners coming through Suez, and all those from the Cape, make West Australia their headland. But East Australia touches Cathay more nearly both in climate and in steamer connections, and a day will dawn when the construction of yet another railway from Port Darwin in the Northern Territory will make that port the nearest to Europe; and there are yet other projects for joining Australia in shorter and shorter links to Panama and San Francisco. So perhaps the engines will call a truce over their claims on the older East and West, and will confine them to that newer West and fast-developing East which the Australian continent provides within itself.

The engine from the West, if it were of a philosophic turn might say that the land it came from was of immemorial age, a relic of the world before the Deluge; that its strange flowers, its bush coming as close to its towns and settlements as grass to the trees on a lawn, were older than mankind, and if by some accident of social progress its towns and villages were swept away, then in a few years Western Australia would slip back through time till it became again a strip of the earth as the earth was when first the mammals began to appear on its surface. Western Australia is as old as that; and he who looks on it now with any spark of imagination cannot but be thrilled at the vision afforded him of the planet as it was millions of years ago. 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; here he had found gold in the wilderness; and here—you could see him at the beginning—he was carving wheat-lands and orchards from the forest. Now, lastly, he was going to bring his fields and forests and the harvest of his untapped sea-board by rail to the markets of the East.

The locomotive from the East, with puffs which politeness had hitherto repressed, would yield the point about antiquity in order to show that in the more modern period the East had done very well with its time. On the progress of Melbourne and Sydney it would not enlarge; suffice it to point out the advantages of Adelaide.

It lies between the hills and the sea, a trap for sunbeams; a garden city sweet with almond blossom in spring, tree-shaded in summer. A girdle of parks is about its comely waist, and beyond them lie suburbs, where the houses all have room to breathe. In the towns of the old world the houses are on the top of one another, and the people too. In Adelaide expansion takes place laterally, stretching out always to the encircling range of hills; and the houses are one-storied. The city is linked with its suburbs by radiating tramlines; and here one may pause to interpolate an anecdote. Some years ago, when the writer was in Naples, he was journeying by one of the trams which runs round the rim of Naples’ incomparable bay. On the garden seat in front of him were two Americans, who looked with him at the lovely vision, and said one of them: “Well, I’ve been most everywhere, and seen most everything, but I’ve never seen anything to compare with——” The writer leaned forward to catch the anticipated eulogy on the view. “But,” concluded the American lady, “I’ve never seen anything to compare with our car service at Seattle!”

That is what the locomotive from the East would say about the car service at Adelaide, which links up the spreading homesteads of the periphery with the nucleus of handsome buildings, official, municipal, educational, commercial, at the centre of the city. Adelaide is a city within a park, surrounded by a garden suburb, and that is as good a definition as one can find of it. It is handsome within its city limits, taking a pride in its big buildings, the University standing among lawns, its handsome private houses, its broad streets, its general air of competence; but outside them, beyond the parks, one would rather call it charming. The motor-car is bringing its changes to Adelaide as to other places in the world. Just as in London a generation ago the merchants and the well-to-do City men built big houses at Streatham and Dulwich, but now are moving out to Ascot or Sunningdale, so in Adelaide the prosperous are now building towards Mount Lofty and the hills—though the gradients here are trying even to the hard-driven Australian motor-car. The fringe of suburbs is therefore occupied by what in England we should call the professional classes, though no such conventions segregate the trading, the commercial, the professional classes in the same way as in the home country. But Adelaide is in one respect different from other Australian cities. It has more nearly a professional class—or may we say a professorial class?—than Perth or Melbourne, or Sydney, or Brisbane. An English journalist once tried to express it by saying that Adelaide represented “culture” in the Commonwealth; but that is unkind both to Adelaide and the Commonwealth, for the soil of Australia is unfavourable to the growth of culture or any other pretences. But Adelaide has a large population in its trim bungalows of the suburbs, interested in university work, in education, in social and democratic problems, in art, in literature. It has the most eclectic collection of pictures of any of the states; and here perhaps one may tell another story. In the year before the War there was an outbreak of allegorical canvases on the walls of the New English Art Club where a return to primitive methods of expression in paint reflected the activities of Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Futurism which permeated the studios of Europe. Among others who had a hack at allegory was that most capable of the younger school of painters, Mr. W. Orpen, and he produced a representation of “The Board of Irish Agriculture sowing the Seeds of Progress in Ireland.” It was a picture which was full of remarkably fine drawing, as one might expect from one of the best two draughtsmen in Britain, and the nude figure of the lady distributing seed (on the left of the canvas), as well as the two naked babies in the middle, and the black-clothed missioner on the right, were all admirable. But what did it mean? Most English critics were silent on this point, and nobody seems to have troubled Mr. Orpen to explain himself, for, as Wilde wrote to Whistler, “to be great is to be misunderstood.” However, the picture was bought for the Adelaide Art Gallery, which is rightly anxious to collect work of the younger artists, and made no mistake in choosing Mr. Orpen as one of the most brilliant among them.