All the public buildings are dignified and handsome, with white stone fronts. The University buildings are adapted from a former Government House, and stand in beautiful grounds which run down to the river.
The Botanical Gardens, which flank the drive, are also washed by the broad, swiftly flowing river. They are enchanting to linger in more so even than the world-famous tropical gardens of Buitenzorg in Java. Perhaps it was the moisture and greenness after the arid look of most of the rest of Australia at the end of the dry season, that seemed to us so refreshing and delightful. At any rate, we never tired of wandering in these gardens, where hedges of sweet peas and stocks alternated with every kind of gorgeous tropical flowering shrub, now just coming into bloom. Here were palms and sloping lawns; by the river grew the curious bunya bunya trees, with their bare arms and mop-like ends; here were greenery and quiet; and, most blessed of all, freedom from dust. Above the river two large kingfishers often glanced to and fro; they must have had a nest close at hand.
CHAPTER XVIII
A DAY IN THE QUEENSLAND BUSH
This was one of the most delightful of all the many crowded days we spent in Australia, for it revealed to us the wonder and the beauty of the Queensland Bush.
We started early for the station through the streets that leave on one’s mind, looking back, an impression of sharply defined black and white, from the contrasting sunlight and shadow in that brilliant atmosphere. The three hours’ journey to Nambour, where we were to see a sugar manufactory, was full of interest. The line passes quite near the curious peaks, which Captain Cook called the Glass House mountains. The origin of the name is conjectural, but it is supposed that the conical shape of some of them resembled the glass-blowing factories in the England of his boyish days. These bare, isolated peaks push themselves up sharply and precipitately from the plain. They are formed of trachyte or some kindred igneous rock, and geologists are not agreed as to their origin among the surrounding sandstone. We saw again many of the grass trees, as they call the Queensland variety of the West Australian “black boy.” The tropical bush begins about fifty miles from Brisbane, where a Government Reserve has been created on either side of the line, which passes through a belt of forest with palms and ferns and richly varied undergrowth. Now and then a little party of men at work on the line would shout clamorously for “papers.” Their only chance of getting news of the outside world is to attract the attention of passengers in the passing trains, and get them to throw out newspapers. The country round here is very rich and fertile, and for the first time we saw pineapple farms. In a good year pineapples can be bought in some parts of Queensland for threepence a dozen, so we were told. They are very good and juicy, and they make a very pleasant form of jam. The plants look like rows of low-growing rushes or very coarse grass.
Towards twelve o’clock the train pulled up between a field of sugar-canes and the Moreton Central Sugar Mill. Sugar is a very handsome crop, when the canes are bearing their tall, feathery flowers. The canes themselves are dark red, jointed like bamboo; the plant is not unlike a very large maize in general effect. Nambour is a centre of the sugar-growing industry, and there are plantations on the slopes of the hills and the banks of the rivers. Two hundred and eighty tons a day are crushed at the Moreton Sugar Mills just outside the town. Its neighbourhood is pervaded by the peculiar sweet, thick, cloying smell of the canes, a smell that can never be forgotten; we recognised cargoes of raw sugar afar off on every wharf and landing-stage and railway station on which we encountered it, during the remainder of our stay in Australia.
The history of sugar-growing here is very interesting. It was started originally on the system of large plantations worked by coloured labour. No other system of working sugar plantations in the tropics was known. Natives were imported from the Pacific Islands. Planters erected their own mills, and conducted their business through managers and overseers. In the early seventies the industry was rapidly developing, but two circumstances intervened to hamper it. The price of cane sugar fell owing to the great increase in the manufacture of beet sugar in Europe; the Government prohibited the employment of coloured labour. These circumstances revolutionised the industry. The large plantations gave place to smaller farms worked by white labour; the farmers received Government grants to enable them to erect co-operative factories; further, a Government bounty was imposed as a compensation for the withdrawal of coloured labour; this was subsequently abolished. The Central Mill System by which groups of farmers control the factories continues. The canes are crushed and the sugar sent to the refiners. The work of manufacture is carried out under scientific supervision, and state sugar experimental stations test the various species of cane, and determine which are most productive, and most immune from disease. Thus the Queensland Sugar Industry is specially interesting, because it has solved the problem of carrying on a tropical manufacture with white labour.
The Moreton Central Sugar Mill, which we visited, is close to the main line of railway, but light railways run in all directions through the district to bring the canes up on trucks to the mill. Masses of dark red cane were lying about round the mill, and coming in on little trucks. The raw cane tastes faintly sour. The sugar mill itself was filled with the all-pervading sickly, thick, sweet smell of the raw sugar, and streaming with moisture. The temperature is very high. We climbed under and over moving machinery, were asphyxiated with steam, nauseated with sweetness, and covered with molasses, all in the pursuit of knowledge.
Still it was a very interesting experience. All processes of manufacture are interesting. The canes are shot in from outside, and crushed by a series of heavy rollers till a thick juice pours out. When this is all extracted the exhausted fibre is burnt in the furnaces. The juice of the cane is boiled in great vats. In its final stages of boiling it is thick and black as tar. It is then run into revolving cylinders, called centrifugalisers. These rotate at a very great rate, and are fascinating to watch, for in a few minutes the dark, sticky mass has disappeared, and the sides of the cylinder are coated with a coarse yellow sugar very much sweeter than that which appears on our tea tables.