It was a bright afternoon of sunshine, and the Botanical Gardens to which we went on the way to an At Home were looking their best after an earlier rain. They are laid out on rising ground, with ornamental water, sloping lawns, and graceful groups of trees.
In the evening we dined very pleasantly with a university professor, when a fellow-guest at dinner described his experiences in shooting the rapids of an Australian river. He and the friend who went with him had to keep their food in watertight bags, as the canoes continually upset. The one thing, he said, was whatever happened never to let go of the canoe, or you would find yourself two hundred miles from anywhere, bereft of all means of existence. “Was it dangerous?” somebody asked. “You are never out of danger,” was the reply. And it is this sense of the possibility of adventure that constitutes part of the charm of colonial life, where men come into contact and into conflict with a nature not yet all sleek and combed.
Our last day at Melbourne we spent in driving round the city and such of its environs as we had not already seen. We visited St. Kilda’s, the watering-place of Melbourne. A low, grey, cloudy sky threw a pale light on the waters of the great inland sea, with its pretty opposite shore. This is Melbourne’s pleasure-place, with hotels along the front.
Returning through the older part of Melbourne we saw the old road along which men went out to the diggings, with some of its original galvanised iron buildings still standing. We passed by the cemetery, where the first settlers were buried, closed long ago. As we returned into the everyday busy streets of the great city we met the newly formed Australian contingent of troops marching out to their camping-ground. There can be few people so invertebrate that they can watch levies on the march without a responsive thrill, even in time of peace, and these men were going to fight not for their homes and families and country, but were relinquishing all for their distant kindred in a life-and-death struggle miles away. This great unpeopled country, where men are so urgently needed, was gladly sending of its best to “the Old Country”—“home,” as they tenderly call it, with a depth of sentiment incomprehensible here, and incomprehensible to anyone who does not know and feel his own patriotism awake and flourish on alien soil.
Our last visit was to the Tourist Bureau, which in general management and organisation is incomparably the best in Australia. Here we were given our choice of the admirable views of Victoria and small handbooks of local interest. That afternoon our visit concluded.
We left Melbourne feeling more Australian than the Australians. The afternoon sun was gilding the level plain as we sped across it, passing scattered villages, often little more than clusters of iron-roofed shanties, with a horse, its bridle hitched to a post, and children and dogs playing in the road. After the swift darkness had come, there was a clear night of stars lighting up the dim country, the great spreading empty plain with its scattered gum trees, while the lamps of the carriages sent out shafts of light, like searchlights, across brilliantly illuminated patches, momentarily visible in the darkness.