There is generally some one feature of a town that stands out afterwards more distinctly than the rest. In the mental picture that the name of Brisbane evokes it will always be the Botanical Gardens, cool and quiet with their banks sloping to the river, that wake the pleasanter memories. Here we came often to escape from the all-pervading dust, and here we came on our last evening in the brief twilight that intervenes for some few minutes between sunset and the fading of the afterglow. The level rays of the sun silhouetted the grotesque bunya-bunya trees on the river-banks so that they looked like bunches of crooked housemaids’ mops. The peace and calm of the quiet place were intensified by the rapidly falling dusk. Except for the scolding and chattering of a party of white Australian cockatoos in an aviary, there was no sound but the swishing of the wind in a grove of dry bamboos, and the little cropping noise of some kangaroos feeding and skittering about in a paddock. In a small round pond fringed by Cape lilies a bull-frog was beginning to cluck. Already the palm trees were black against the fading orange afterglow. A too peremptory custodian cut short the enchanting moment; it was closing time he said. So we made our way back through the busy clangour of the crowded streets, and for the last time sat out on the balcony after dinner in the dusty half-light of the street lamps and the stars, and watched the Southern Cross above the palms, and Venus shining with a lustre and a brilliancy unknown to northern skies.
PALM AVENUE, BOTANIC GARDENS, BRISBANE.
Our last morning came filled with the bustle of packing and departure. And for the last time let us urge upon travellers to Australia to take far less luggage than they can possibly imagine they will want. Let them bear in mind, in the first place, the great inconvenience of transferring small luggage, when there are no porters, the hideous nuisance of packing and unpacking if they have to do it for themselves; the very much simpler standard of dress that prevails in a new country, where even in the capital people are contented to go out to dinners and theatres by tram; well-to-do people dressed in elaborate cloaks and satin shoes. The variation of climate compels a fairly large assortment of clothes of different weight. But cut it down rigorously. This digression is inspired by the recollection of the exhausting nature of our packing in the heat. When it was done we had to charter a cart and a man, and freightage in Australia is far from cheap, to take it the half-mile to the station, where its mountainous bulk was with difficulty packed into the very dusty little train that runs from Brisbane to Pinkenbar, lower down the river, whence the steamers sail for the Northern Territory.
We had already paid one visit to Pinkenbar to engage a porter, a lean, tall, weather-beaten old man, selected on the wharf, to bring a truck to the station and convey our luggage to the boat. When we arrived and got out of the train with a litter of small baggage, the first thing we saw was a large American trunk tightly jammed half in and half out of the window of the guard’s van, the guard having got so much of our luggage between himself and the door that he could not get it open. Fortunately, however, our porter from the wharf was on the spot in every sense of the word. He first shouted encouraging directions to the guard, and then by the exercise of brute force thrust the trunk back through the window without doing any serious damage to that perturbed official. Eventually, with the help of another man, we got under way and proceeded to the landing-stage. The rough intervening ground was overgrown with tall blue thistles with flowers like pale yellow anemones; they looked as incongruous as if someone had stuck them on. After seeing our luggage over the ship’s side and consigning it to the steward, we returned to Brisbane in search of lunch and recovered our calm, for the boat did not sail till towards evening.
It was after lunch on this last day that we saw a thing we had always wanted very much to see and despaired of doing so. It was the little Australian tree bear, or koala bear, once very common, now becoming rare. We heard from a French waiter that there was one in the hotel, and presuming on our experience of Australian good nature, sent a message to its unknown owner to ask if we might see it before we left. He brought it down immediately, carried in the arms of his little girl, and it really was an adorable little thing. It was about the same size as the very largest child’s “Teddy Bear,” grey in colour. Its little hand-like fore paws were holding on to the lace of the little girl’s pinafore, one on each side of her neck, and it turned its head and fixed a pair of wistful eyes upon us. She said it slept all day and woke up at night, when it cried for milk like a cat. It only ate gum leaves. “When we were boys,” said its owner, “we used to hunt them. It took thirty or forty shots to bring one down, and then it would take eight or ten dogs to finish one, they are so tough.” Even so, these charming and harmless little animals, which live in the gum trees and feed on their leaves, are becoming exterminated.
It was late afternoon when we made our third and last visit to Pinkenbar. The scene in the neighbourhood of the station was so typically Australian that we lingered regretfully to take a last look at it. The rough dusty road that led away inland, the drove of horses in an enclosure waiting to be entrained for the War, with another horse hitched on to the fence by its bridle, the clear strong stereoscopic light, a paddock of burnt grass, the scattered row of houses beyond, with flat grey roofs, built high on piles, and beyond again gum trees and more gum trees. We turned away towards the wharf with a certain sadness, for this spacious country with its austere beauty and its handful of warm-hearted inhabitants is wonderfully endearing in spite of, or perhaps because of, all its crudeness. We distributed our newspapers among the men loafing and smoking on the wharf, who took them with that frank friendliness of a country, where class distinctions are almost unfelt; and went on board the boat that lay alongside, still busy with the bustle of departure.