Afterwards we crossed a spacious pastoral country dotted sparsely with homesteads, peaceful in the great calm of the luminous evening, then the swift dusk fell and blotted out all. At Murray Bridge we paused for dinner, in the old-fashioned continental way. Dinner in railway stations in Australia is simple and expeditious, and in our experience invariably excellent. It is thrown at the traveller by a miscellaneous assortment of young women, who fall over each other in their hospitable anxiety to get through the menu in time. That, however, did not suffice, for having hastily despatched our soup and the very good turkey, which is always a standing dish in Australia, and trifled with a sweet, we were summoned back to the train. Here we observed in passing along the corridor to our own carriage a bulky-looking passenger disgorging from his pockets large quantities of the dessert, which we had had no time to eat, and which he had adroitly commandeered. He was bulging with it, in fact, and was now proudly exhibiting a selection of it spread out on the opposite seat of the carriage—five oranges, three apples, and some bananas. Seeing our eye upon him he offered us a share of the spoils, as a species of hush money in kind. Oranges and apples and bananas are delicious in Australia; the dry soapy things sold for bananas in London give no idea of what a pleasant form of food a fresh banana can be.
He is no traveller who cannot sleep on any occasion under any circumstances, even in a rattling and draughty train. After a good night we woke up next morning to see an immense grassy plain stretching away to the horizon on either side. Cattle and sheep were feeding, and there were patches of plough land. For the first time the “bush” had retreated to a respectful distance.
PART III
VICTORIA
CHAPTER IX
COLLINS STREET—MELBOURNE
On the day we reached Adelaide the train that took us from Port Adelaide to the city slipped by an encampment of tents, those of the naval division; and on the day we left Melbourne we saw the recruits for Australia’s first contingent swing past us along Collins Street. Splendid they looked: young and strong and confident. The cars and motor omnibuses bunched up by the pavement, and the people hung out of the windows to cheer as they went by. I remember I suddenly found myself without a hat and the tears running down my cheek, when the last of them disappeared in the dust, the crowd closing in behind them. There was only a fortnight or so between that first glimpse at Adelaide that war had begun, and the assurance that Australia had grasped what was to be her share in it, when she sent her boys on the way to camp through Collins Street.
Collins Street. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, Melbourne will always be expressed to us in terms of Collins Street. It is a wide street of tall buildings, and it photographs well. It has not grown up haphazard. It is rectangular; and it exhibits Melbourne’s ideal of doing the thing well, and of doing it in an official way. No street in London is very like it, though Melbourne has more in common with London than any other city we have ever seen. There is the same nucleus of business and trading, shopping and luxury; the parks almost, but not quite, set in the middle of things; and trams and suburban lines linking up nearer suburbs (with High Streets of their own), and more distant ones with large houses and their gardens, and more distant ones still where the houses are cheaper. It has an official residence for the Governor-General, set, as Buckingham Palace is, in a green park; and it has a river though we will not press the point of any resemblance in it to the Thames. In short, if you were to name anything in London to us—Regent’s Park or Tottenham Court Road, the Mansion House or the Natural History Museum, St. Pancras Railway Station or the Reform Club—we believe we could find you something of the kind in Melbourne. They have even a Tate Gallery, and it has pictures which might have been the choice of the Chantrey Bequest.
One word more about Collins Street, and then, having served its purpose as a simile, we may leave it. It is a London street, the artery of an organism much smaller than London, so that it is a composite. It has shops and clubs, hotels and banks, and nearly all are square and solid. It is as wide as Kingsway, but less uniform than that thoroughfare will be; as busy as Cheapside, but less heterogeneous; as popular as Regent Street, but one of less specific attractions; and the one characteristic of it which is unmistakable is that it is the principal street of a big city. That is what Melbourne is. It is a city, a city where money is made, and big business goes on. It is to Melbourne and to Collins Street that you must come if you are to talk to the men who are planning and financing and ordering the Australia of the future.
There is a Melbourne of another kind, just as there are many Londons. There is Melbourne of the University, nestling in its gardens and secure in the strongest foundation a University can have, the solid research of its professors and teachers. It would not thank us for any forced comparison with the ineffable charm that the years and memories have brought to our own older Universities; but it has their air of unself-consciousness and breeding.