CHAPTER XVI
BANANA-LAND
Oh Land of Ours, hear the song we make for you—
Land of yellow wattle bloom, land of smiling Spring—
Hearken to the after words, land of pleasant memories.
Shea-oaks of the shady creeks, hear the song we sing.
Those lines were written by an Australian in exile, for he was with the Australian contingent in the war in South Africa. He is dead now, and he did not long survive the brave soldiers whose epitaph he wrote beginning with those words, which seem, to one who has known Australia only a little, to sum up in a wonderful way the clinging memories of the land. He spoke too of the “blue skies clear beyond the mountain-tops,” and “the dear dun plains where we were bred,” and there are no two sentences which more simply or clearly bring back Australia to the mind. But it is the Australia of the west and the south. When the Hawkesbury River is crossed eastwards, and the flats where the first Cornstalks were raised have been left behind, a new country comes into vision. It is tropic Queensland, whose inhabitants are called Banana-landers, because the banana finds the climate very suitable to its growth.[21]
Naturally the change is not immediately apparent in the long, long journey by rail. The enchanting cool stretches of the Hawkesbury give place to the ascending grades of the hills; then there are interminable stretches of the dun plains, broken by lengths almost as long of gaunt forest, sometimes dead wood. Then the plateau of fine pasture of the Darling Downs, and the descent warmer and moister and greener as you go into the land of the banana and the pine. It is also, if you strike far enough north, the land of the prickly pear.
Railway journeying is not a bad way of seeing a country if you have no better. One can gain an impression of China such as nothing can obliterate by taking the North China Railway up to Harbin; and people have written books of impressions of Java on the strength of the five days’ journey which can be made from the port of Sourabaya, through crumbling Djokjokarta and the wondrous Javanese highlands to Batavia. So something of the nature of Queensland can be arrived at by that long night and half-a-day journey by rail, though if we were asked what was the chief impression which, at this distance of time, is left on our minds, we should answer that it was one of wood and pasture lying waiting for men and money—vast resources which need the spade and the axe and the drill—and more railway.
Side by side would be quite another impression, one quite without significance. It was that of the little township, one of many, where we stopped for supper—a meal engulfed in all possible haste, and yet in the midst of it there suddenly appeared on the platform of the hall, which on ordinary occasions is probably used as a cinema theatre, the Mayor. We were, as we should again explain, members of a large travelling party, and the opportunity was one which the Mayor could not resist. He bade us welcome to —— (the name is forgotten), and added what delight it was to see among us so many happy faces.... Then having had our meal cut short by the oration, we hastened back to the waiting special.
Queensland is full of townships like that—townships which are springing into towns. Sometimes they seem to consist of a few boards knocked together with telegraph wire; at a later stage they have added a handsome Town Hall, a Catholic cathedral in red brick, a humbler Church of England one ... but most of them retain the suburb of wooden-frame houses. They do not spring out of the bush in the same way that the towns of Western Australia do; perhaps because the clearings have been made larger. But everywhere you seem to see right back to the beginnings of the place, when a few people settled there and lived there; and gradually added this and that to it, till Townsville, or Maryborough, became to them the finest place in the world—because they called it home. Even Brisbane, with its broad bank-building-fronted Queen Street, retains something of the same aspect.