Of course the reason why we saw so few sheep is that, though this was a comparatively small holding of very good pasture, and the sheep on it are all, in a sense, specimen sheep, yet here, as elsewhere, the thousands of the flock are spread over a very wide area of pasturage. It is only at the shearing season that the sheep would be brought together in great numbers. These occasions, and the life on sheep farms—especially in the back blocks, where the life is wilder, the herbage scanty, the seasons precarious—are interesting enough, though here we cannot dwell on them. What does remain as the recollection of Mr. Murray’s sheep farm is that of a hospitality and a generosity which are so natural that they are never ostentatious, but which, long after the day and hour have gone, warm the heart with the memory of them.
CHAPTER VII
ADELAIDE
We had been warned to expect cold and rough weather, if anywhere, in the great Australian Bight, but like everything we had ever been told about Australian weather, the prophecy was fallacious. The Tuesday in August on which we sailed from Fremantle and the four following days of the voyage were fine, calm, and sunny. We skirted a coast bound by gneiss rocks, rounded, ground, and weather-worn to smoothness, with immense breakers dashing their foam up the face of the cliffs. Except the beautiful harbour of Albany, it is a most inhospitable-looking coast.
On the third day out a wireless message from Perth warned the captain to alter his course and to moderate the ship’s lights at night so as to disguise her. It was a significant suggestion, that the War, the outbreak of which took place while we were at sea, but in which we hardly yet believed, was a matter of grim earnest. Otherwise the voyage was uneventful. We reached Adelaide, sliding in through glassy water, with land on either side, and numbers of diving birds swimming round us. After the inevitable delay of disembarkation that seems so unnecessary to the impatient traveller, we at last got ashore, walked through the Customs, merely an amiable formality, and took the train for Adelaide, which is at some distance from its harbour. The line runs through salt marshes, dotted with pink mesembryanthemum in flower. Then come trim suburbs with English names, a Cheltenham among them; presently the train appeared to be running through the streets of a big city, and we had arrived at Adelaide station.
NORTH TERRACE, ADELAIDE.
The different capitals of the Australian states are as unlike each other as possible, and Adelaide is especially distinctive. This graceful garden city has none of the rawness of our dear Perth. She has, on the contrary, an established air. The hotel at which we stayed might have been in any large town in the world, except for a certain friendly loquacity on the part of the staff, and a trifling indifference to details characteristic of Australia.
The first impression of Adelaide is a delightful one. She is a city of space and light and air, with broad, tree-planted streets and fine buildings; in fact, more like the Australia we had imagined, because less unlike England, than the West. The cathedral with its twin spires dominates the whole from rising ground. The city is laid out in straight lines, separated by parks from its spreading, growing suburbs, the whole place is green and restful.
In the afternoon of our arrival we were motored round the city and its suburbs, and a closer acquaintance deepened this impression, for we passed through avenues of plane trees and saw English plants growing in the gardens. Rising ground revealed the lovely situation of Adelaide and gave a view of the city as a whole, scattered among her trees and gardens, girdled by green hills rising abruptly from its environs, with the grey Pacific spread out to infinite distance beyond. The cloudy, hazy distances, a certain crispness in the air, as on a fine March day at home, the grass that grows freely everywhere, and suburbs with such names as Knightsbridge, all deepened the sense of familiarity. We shall always see Adelaide in imagination as we looked down on her that early spring day, with all her orchards a delicate pale pink mist of almond blossom, and the soft grey distances that felt like home.