We now had to cross the wide mouth of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and round the westerly headland, behind which is the bay, that shelters Port Darwin in the Northern Territory, our last port of call in Australia. We sighted two frigate birds and quantities of large white jelly-fish. We often saw, too, bones of the cuttle-fish floating on the water, like bits of white paper. They were noted also by Dampier on approaching the Australian coast: “We began to see some scuttle bones floating on the water,” he remarks, “and drawing still nearer we saw quantities of them.” The voyage after getting free of the Barrier Reef was less entirely pleasant, as all deck and cabin lights had to be darkened, or left unlighted at night, to disguise or conceal the ship from prowling German cruisers. The portholes were blackened and kept shut, the windows of the dining saloon boarded up each evening, so that dinner was a stifling affair, and our pleasant informal musical evenings came to an end, for no one could endure the atmosphere of the music-room. There was, however, compensation, for the darkened decks were very restful in the evening, and the stars were brilliant as they had never seemed before, Venus making a path along the water like moonshine.
CHAPTER XXI
THE NORTHERN TERRITORY
The Northern Territory is one of Australia’s many problems. How can the immense tract of rich and fertile country with its tropical northern area be cultivated, and its great resources developed, without the importation of coloured labour? The native black population, though they are useful and efficient with stock, are found to be unadapted for agriculture, and incapable of the steady methodical work essential to its success. The immigration of Chinese, who formerly were the market gardeners of the neighbourhood of Port Darwin, supplying the small resident white population with fruit and vegetables, has now been discouraged, and we saw the plantations they had cultivated falling back into, and becoming merged with the wilderness of the bush. It is still an open question whether white men can perform manual labour under the tropical suns of the coastal belt. Yet the future of Port Darwin must be assured if it is eventually to become our nearest and most direct port of call in Australia. It will in time be connected by railroad with the southern states, as it now is by the telegraph service. In the interior nomadic tribes of blacks hunt and fish and wander; hardy settlers have pitched their homesteads in a clearing in the forest, and raise cattle there, with the nearest neighbour a hundred miles away; the lonely buffalo hunter plies his lucrative trade with the help of native hunters.
The Australians themselves do not seem to know very much more about the Northern Territory than the average Englishman. They speak of it as an arid wilderness, much in the same way as they regard Western Australia; yet, to the visitor from home, it is the beauty and the wildness of Western and Northern Australia, that make an appeal far more profound than that of the busy, civilised, and comparatively populous southern and eastern states. With all their differences they are still too much like home to stir the imagination. What is popularly known about the Northern Territory is largely learned from the writings of a clever Australian woman,[25] who has lived the isolated yet stimulating life of the settler’s wife in the interior. The part to be played by women in the future of the Northern Territory is a very important one. It is a hard thing for a man to go into exile with his cattle and his black retainers, but if Australian or European women will consent to share the hardships, and the rough life, and the loneliness, in order to make a home for their men; bringing to it, as opportunity offers, the atmosphere and the comforts of civilisation, the problem of opening up the inland country is helped considerably on its way. That there are compensations in the life no one can doubt, who has talked with those who know it, or seen the lonely homesteads in the bush, that wonderful primeval forest with its manifold beauty and mystery.
For those who stay at home, no better idea of it can be derived than from reading Mrs. Gunn’s “We of the Never Never,” in which she describes the daily life of a cattle station up-country, and all her odd adventures with the native servants, honest warm-hearted creatures, with the artless cunning, and the caprices of children. The residents of Port Darwin talked of the light-hearted gaiety of their native servants, and their happy irresponsibility. Yet they seem to work well in their own erratic way; but from time to time they find the call of the wild irresistible, then they obey it, and steal away to their native island, or forest tribe, till the conditions of life there weary them, and the whim seizes them to return.
VIEW NEAR DARWIN.
Approaching Port Darwin from the east the navigation is difficult and dangerous. All the day before, we had steamed very slowly in order to avoid reaching the passage of the Vernon Isles after nightfall. The islands are inhabited, and the smoke of bush fires was frequently to be seen, either signal fires lighted by the natives, or by Europeans, to burn off the dead grass at the end of the winter.
The approach to Port Darwin is charmingly pretty. The tropical vegetation that comes down nearly to the water’s edge is a vivid green, and the cliffs that fringe the shore a warm red. The tops of quite important-looking houses were showing among the trees.