CHAPTER II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
It behoves visitors to Australia to realise that they will have a good many things to do for themselves that they have never done before, and that the conditions of travelling, for instance, are very different from those in Europe. To begin with, the station porter is absent, and everyone has to carry his own hand baggage, for in a country, where labour is very scarce and very highly paid, there are no loafers ready to scramble for odd jobs, even at a port. What cannot be carried ashore by the passengers is left to be dealt with, frequently much to its detriment, by agencies whose representatives come on board for the purpose and convey it, or some of it, to its owner’s destination. Stray packages, providentially arrive in time to go on to the next stopping-place with their owner. This applies not only to landing, but to railway travelling; so that it can easily be arranged for by those who are prepared in advance.
It was quite dark when we went ashore, and it is the oddest sensation to land in an unknown country after dark. We had been told on the boat that the station was at a distance of ten minutes’ walk, but in the absence of cabs and porters its whereabouts was problematical. We therefore deposited our bags and awaited events.
Then out of the obscurity a man came up with some hesitation and asked us our names. It was our host, who had been guided to us in the dark by some occult sense, for we were unknown to each other except by name. He greeted us heartily with the kindly solicitude of an old friend, took possession of us and the larger share of our hand baggage, and carried us off to the station.
It was our first experience of an Australian welcome and Australian hospitality; that hospitality, which for unaffected kindness and generosity, can surely have no counterpart on any other continent. The hospitality that makes a guest free of all his host’s possessions, that grudges no time or trouble in his guests’ interest, and that is bestowed in the spirit not of a giver, but the receiver of a benefit. As we walked towards the train the ground seemed curiously soft, as if we were walking ankle-deep in dust. It was not till next day that we found that this part of Western Australia consists everywhere of loose yellow sand like that by the seashore. The night was very mild after the keen sea air, and encumbered with bags and our heavy coats, we arrived at the station in time to see the train go out, and waited for the next one in a large empty booking-hall. At last the little train rattled in, and we started. We crossed the broad Swan River, above which a crescent moon was hanging, and Venus shone with the luminous brilliancy of southern skies. One of us went on to Perth: the other descended at Cottesloe Beach.
Here the station fly was waiting. It was shaped like a French diligence and drawn by two ruminative old white horses. The driver, surprised and startled at the apparition of a fare, climbed down, and lit a candle inside the fly, the light of which disclosed white lace curtains at the windows tied up with red ribbon. A few minutes jolting drive, and we were at our destination, and, jumping out, plunged immediately into soft, deep sand, before the entrance to a large one-storied house, its corrugated iron white-painted roof shining in the starlight as if it were covered with snow.
Our hostess, who had waited dinner for us an unconscionable time, had neither allowed that, nor her welcome to get cold in the interim, and took us to a room sweet with the scent of a great bowl of wattle, and a bunch of very large, deep purple violets—a room that seemed strangely quiet after the long-heard straining and cracking of the timbers in our cabin. Here our sleep was lulled only by the fitful creaking of the little windmill in the garden.
The charming house in which we stayed at Cottesloe Beach was typical of nearly all West Australian houses. It stood, as even the smallest workman’s cottage stands, in its own grounds detached from its neighbours’, a roomy bungalow with a broad verandah running right round it. The verandah is an essential, all-important part of a West Australian house. The family sleep in it all the year round, using the bedrooms merely as dressing-rooms; they live on another side of it during the day.
In the country suburbs the houses are built on piles to protect them from the attacks of white ants. White ants can eat everything except jarrah, a hard red eucalyptus wood, which has been tried for paving London streets. The foundations of all the houses are formed of jarrah piles; on the top of every pile is put an iron saucer, and on this again is erected the superstructure of the building. The iron saucer is indispensable, and, “capping the pile,” takes the place of laying the foundation-stone. The white ants can neither penetrate it, nor run outside it, for they won’t come into the light.
An immense corrugated galvanised iron water-tank stands beside every house, and most of the larger ones have their own windmill for pumping up water.