We at last emerged from the mill, instructed, but very sticky, and cast about for some spot in which it would be possible to obtain soap and water. There were buildings of some kind close by, warehouses or something of the sort, connected with the station, with two men sitting on the verandah. We asked them if they could tell us the nearest way to soap and water. One of them indicated with his pipe a large galvanised iron tank with a tap in the bottom, and a broken tumbler, but they shook their heads over the problem of soap. We turned on the tap hopefully, but the Australian rainfall was quite inadequate to remove molasses. So we went in search of the Nambour hotel. However new an Australian town may be, it always has an hotel or two, and a sort of communal hall. Nambour has in addition a few shops and some stray cows and horses. We watched a cow eating sugar cane with every manifestation of pleasure. It was not till we got to Queensland, by the way, that we began to see horses everywhere, just as we had imagined them in Australia, hitched up to gates by the bridle.
We made our way to the hotel, where everyone was very busy preparing lunch. There was no hot water upstairs, but, penetrating into the kitchen, where there was a great bustle, and anything extraneous was very much in the way, we succeeded in getting a pudding basin full of hot water and a teacloth, and attacked the molasses in the yard outside, before an audience of poultry. Molasses, however, appears to yield to nothing, not even chemical cleaning. It always re-emerges. So relinquishing the vain attempt, we repaired to lunch.
NAMBOUR.
Whatever you don’t have for lunch in Australia, you always seem to have turkey. It is like the inevitable poulet in Continental hotels. There must be enormous quantities of wild turkeys there; at any rate, they are always succulent. We also always had very good and elaborate trifles, and very weak tea, and, on this occasion, strawberries and cream and pineapple. After lunch there was a long interval, while we sat on a fence, and watched another ruminative cow eating sugar cane. We were waiting for the “loco.” We were not very clear what it was, and when it arrived, it turned out to be a little engine drawing some trucks, across which rough planks had been thrown for seats, like those at Big Brook; but whereas the engine on that occasion was stoked with logs, and gave out a fragrant aromatic smoke, this dilatory “loco” burnt some kind of soft coal, and had a very short chimney, so that we were deluged with large and solid smuts, in comparison with which the molasses were the merest trifle. However, the country through which it took us was so beautiful and enchanting that nothing else mattered. It was our first experience of tropical bush. Elsewhere there had been little undergrowth, the tall gums soared upwards unimpeded. Here the vast white eucalyptus trees were festooned with thickly interlacing creepers hanging in great ropes. High up on the trees grew masses of staghorn ferns and orchids. Far out of reach the graceful, delicate “rock lily” hung its pendulum of pale chablis-coloured bells, and still more exquisite were the fragile white blooms of another orchid. In places were stretches of sugar plantation, and banana fields, always with their background of hill and forest. The fresh greenness of everything was delightful, for the district is well watered.
The line, which was sometimes laid across rough logs thrown over a small gorge, with a stream running through it, ended abruptly in the Maroochy River, swift-flowing between low banks, with the tall trees of the forest on one side, and a sugar plantation waving feathery heads of bloom on the other. We walked back with two friends. It was much more silent than an English forest. There was no pattering of the small feet of birds on the dry, dead carpet of leaves, and no continual twitter. A profusion of ferns grew along the track, and a quantity of large scarlet raspberries. The gum trees were putting out their red spring shoots. Sometimes the clear, sharp call of the peewit sounded, or the infectious peal on peal of mocking giggles from the kookooburra, sometimes the frogs were crying all together, as they cried in Aristophanes’ time, “Breckkek kek kek—koax koax,” and now for the first time we heard the Australian bull frog that clucks like a hen. Here and there was a clearing with a homestead with high verandahs. They made one long to spend a month in that lovely place, and feel day by day the great peace of the forest, with only the frogs and the trickle of a stream over its smooth, brown rocks to break the stillness.
We passed occasionally a little camp with a rough cooking place, but there was never anyone in them. As we emerged from that charmed country into the more prosaic, cultivated land, where pineapples were growing, and bananas with their great purple bells, we saw a beautiful brown bird with a long tail, silent and stately as the bush itself. It looked down on us from the high fork of a gum tree, but did not condescend to fly away. Hospitable Nambour had prepared tea for us on our return; not what we mean by tea at home, but the Australian tea, a meal calculated to stand a traveller in good stead till breakfast next morning. Of all our sunny Australian days that walk in the bush was one of the most charming episodes.
CHAPTER XIX
IN AND ABOUT BRISBANE
The Brisbane River, flowing gently between its green banks, is a favourite resort of picnic parties, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Australia, where dry wood is abundant and the weather can be depended upon; and the party pride themselves on their skill in producing “billy” tea in the shortest possible space of time. One sunny afternoon we started up the river in a motor launch. On either shore were pretty suburban houses, each with its shady verandah, and palm trees in the gardens. The river does not, however, always flow softly and invite pleasure-seekers to embark upon it. Brisbane people often allude in awestruck tones to “the Flood,” when the river rose and swept away the peaceful bungalows on its banks and wrought much havoc. After a pleasant little voyage we landed with some difficulty on a rickety wooden pier, on the banks of an immense meadow of coarse rough grass stretching away for many acres, with other scattered picnic parties in the far distance; evidently a favourite spot. Our billy was soon boiling, and when tea, which is on these occasions a sort of sacrificial rite, reminiscent of the early settlers, was over, we went up the bank to prospect, and heard for the first time the sound which so many Australians had described to us, “the moaning” of the shea-oak in a rising wind. We had heard it described as “weird” and “depressing,” and it is certainly extraordinarily uncanny. The foliage of the shea-oak is like a lot of knotted whip-cord, and when all its strings are swept together by the wind it gives rise to a strange cry that seems to come from far and near, shrill, insistent, and full of foreboding. It is impossible to compare it to any other sound.