But Queensland is not its towns. Queensland, if you go but the smallest distance away from them, is the unconquered wild; the land where the blacks still signal with fires; where the forests smoulder and blaze for days in the burning sun; a land where it is possible still to be an explorer. Only a few days ago we were speaking to a professor in a laboratory in London, who lived ten years in Australia, and mentioned Queensland. His face lit up in a reminiscent gleam. “I once went for a holiday on the Queensland coast,” said he, “and we had rare sport. We used to go shark-spearing. It can only be done on a few nights in the year. The season is when the sharks come in to the coast; and it must be moonlight ... and you race along the beach with nothing on, and you can see the sharks in the under curve of the big rollers as they break on the beach. And if you are quick and have the knack you can stab at them from underneath, and they can’t get you. I got two or three, though I was only a learner ... the finest sport ...” His voice trailed away into silence. Our friend the distinguished physiologist had gone from dusty London to a place in a tropic land eleven thousand miles away.
That is Queensland as it seemed to us: a place in which the towns were still additions rather than a part of a land where enchantment and adventure still linger. There is an island on the coast which is quite near a thriving town of meat-packing warehouses, streets full of sun and dust and flies, and it is called Magnetic Island. You can reach the island by a steam launch, and the people of the town often make the trip, and when they get there presumably they have lunch at the boarding-house hotel. It is a wooden building with washing hanging out in the backyard and a dissipated emu stalking among the fowls. A melancholy bird which seems to have come unstuffed. So there is nothing romantic at the outset of a journey to Magnetic Island.
But wait. Twenty paces away from the hotel is a stony path, and the trees have closed in behind you. A hundred yards, and if you strayed away from the path the way would be lost. Dense trees, rock cropping out at times, and no way out. A strange bird calls somewhere in the distance, but it is otherwise very still and stifling. There is a tree covered with yellow flowers, but it has a poisonous look; and if you venture to pluck it a regiment of stinging ants sallies out at you. So you drop it and go on. And here is a tree covered with butterflies, thousands upon thousands of them. And now you come to a mangrove swamp, and if you look down at the roots of the mangroves you will find the rare fish that live half in and half out of the water, and can hop about in the mud. So suddenly you realise that this is an island such as all the adventurers and pirates and wrecked sailors have been cast upon in the romances. Here they would have sought long for water, and perhaps have sought in vain. Here they would have had painful experiences with poisonous berries, and would for many days have had to live on shellfish. Perhaps one day they would have seen ascending smoke behind that rocky ridge, and realised that hostile natives were waiting to fall on them. Long, long they would have waited for help and rescue, and perhaps have left only their whitening bones to tell other mariners in other years that rescue came too late....
If you would add verisimilitude to these fancies you can find it, for on a secluded beach of Magnetic Island lies the skeleton of a ship that was wrecked there. It will lie there for many years to come, for it is worth no one’s while to salve it. But to one who saw it a year ago it was a priceless relic, for it proved to him that even now in Queensland the old romance, the old adventure, and the spirit of them still linger in the lands that lie within our reach beyond the seas.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BEGINNING OF THE TROPICS
Soon after crossing the Queensland border we entered a stony country in which intrepid settlers had built themselves houses among granite boulders. In spite of this the soil of the surrounding district is very rich, and consists largely of decomposed granite, which stretches for eight hundred miles round the township of Stanthorpe, and is specially good for fruit-growing and vineyards. “There,” observes the guide-book poetically, “roses bloom all the year round on the cheek of the young, and vigour characterises the movements of the old.”
The line then crossed open country cleared of gums; on the pastures numbers of horses were feeding. Mountain ranges stretched away to the far distance with deep grassy gorges. At one point we passed a large patch of prickly pear, one of the most terrible of Queensland pests which has had to be dealt with by special legislation, both in Queensland and new South Wales. Botanically it is known as a form of Opuntia inermis. It resembles the cactus hedges common in Southern Italy, and was introduced by Governor Philip in 1789, who brought it from Rio de Janeiro as food for the cochineal insect. It is said that the first plant was regarded as so great a curiosity that a gardener was dismissed for neglecting to water it. This may be an apocryphal story, but at any rate the prickly pear took so kindly to the Australian soil, and climate, that vast areas have been overrun by it to an entirely disastrous extent. No entirely successful measures have been evolved for coping with its devastating increase. It is a most serious anxiety to agriculturists, for it is estimated that in Queensland alone thirty million acres have been affected by it, and that it spreads at the rate of one million acres a year. It has found its opportunity in the fact that the districts best suited to it are sparsely populated. No economical means of eradication have been devised. In New South Wales the cost of destroying this pest was calculated a year or two ago at ten or twelve million pounds. Its barbed spinules produce severe irritation in men and animals, and besides its habit of entrenching itself in gullies, on hilltops, and places difficult of access, it is propagated by birds and stock, which eat the seeds; and every joint, or piece of one, forms a new plant.
The township of Warwick lies in the foot hills of the Darling Downs, which the line now crosses. This is one of the most fertile areas in the state. There are over four million acres of rich black soil, formed of decomposed basalt and many feet in depth. It is well watered, has a plentiful rainfall and a temperate climate. Toowoomba is the capital of the district. It is a thriving, growing town, an important centre of agricultural, and especially dairy, produce. The line now turns sharply east, and descends again to the plains, where we saw fields of Indian corn or maize, the stalks left standing after the crops had been gathered.
Long before we arrived at Brisbane it was dark. The less said about Brisbane hotels the better—in all respects. There seemed to be a billiard-room somewhere below our uninviting quarters, for we heard the click of balls, and a man’s voice thickly reproached a comrade for having “given his girl a rosary and made her a Roman Catholic”—an interesting sidelight on the ease with which conversion may be effected. It was so pleasant to be out of the train, that after dinner we strolled about the brightly lighted arcaded streets of the town, and found our way to a broad, swiftly flowing river that reflected the lights of the city.