All the gardens were gay with flowers in this beautiful climate, even at the end of the winter. Masses of purple kennedya,[1] a showy climbing plant with a small pealike flower, hung from a high wooden fence surrounding our host’s house. Geraniums grew like shrubs, and a magenta bougainvillea was a curtain of colour.
We arrived in Australia with the wattle; the mimosa sold in London shops can give but little idea of its trees, shining like cloth of gold among the grey eucalyptus, and outlining the streams. It is comparable to our hawthorn, though it is not in the same way a harbinger of spring, for the mild and flowery winters have no terrors. Australians are immensely proud of their wattle. They never lose an opportunity of commenting on its beauty, and just as no two Irishmen can agree on the exact identity of the Irish shamrock among a variety of small trefoils, so wherever you go in Australia a different variety of mimosa is pointed out as the “true” Australian wattle.
One soon takes as a matter of course the brilliant unvarying Australian sunshine, but on our first walk the day after our arrival, it seemed as if we were wandering in a land of limelight; its hard dazzling white brilliance appeared artificial and unreal. There seemed to be an absence of chiaroscuro, and of atmosphere, the clear-cut distance gave an illusory impression of nearness, annihilating perspective; the eucalyptus with their light, springing branches, sparsely covered with long, narrow leaves, give little shade. From pictures and photographs one is led to suppose that Australian scenery is not unlike that of England. It is wholly and entirely different, not only in its atmospheric effect, and in the more uniform and heavier colouring of its foliage, but every individual plant is unfamiliar. Australia, one may say, roughly speaking, is one vast forest of eucalyptus or gum tree. The gums have many varieties, far too numerous for the traveller to distinguish, from the slight pale trees that are not unlike a silver-barked birch, to the soaring giants of the karri forest, with their smooth white stems; but whatever the variety, the prevailing tinge is a bluish grey. Sometimes the forest or “bush” has been cleared away to make room for orchards, and crops, or towns, or grazing land; sometimes acres of trees have been “ringbarked,” as it is called, a rapid and cheap way of clearing land, by cutting out a ring of bark so that the tree dies, and only a skeleton forest remains, letting in light and air to the soil. But the “bush” is never very far away. It seems to be only waiting to close in again, and swallow up once more what has been so laboriously cleared. West, east, north, and south, the gum tree predominates, though the bush varies in the nature of its undergrowth, which in the tropics becomes rich and beautiful.
The general effect of Australian landscape to English eyes produces an impression of austerity. It is never friendly, perhaps because of the general absence of water, the sombre wooded hills, the vast dun plains, have something aloof and forbidding.
It would be difficult to find anything in life more stimulating and delightful than the first walk in a new country, where every sight and sound is unfamiliar. Strolling along the soft, hot sandy road that first morning, past the low-verandahed houses, each with its wooden palisade, its windmill and big grey water-tank, we came to rising ground overlooking the Swan River. Behind were the low deep blue hills of the Darling Range, and the broad river lay glassy in the heat of the sun, blue as the Lake of Geneva on a summer’s day. Its wooded banks run out in little spits of land with white sandy foreshores, one or two small white-sailed boats were floating idly on it, and some water-fowl swam on its unruffled surface. The foliage of the gums with which its banks are covered is dark and uniform in colour, and had the massive effect of our trees in autumn, before the leaves have begun to turn. The air was heavy with the scent of some white-flowering shrub, the stillness was unbroken except by the note of a magpie; the place seemed a paradise. So it must have looked to the first settlers, the first pioneers, who stood, as we stood, looking down on it. It left an ineffaceable impression, and we never again saw anything more beautiful than that view.
Western Australia is famous for its wild flowers. We were a month too early, but even so we saw many strange and beautiful varieties. They are more numerous here than anywhere else in the world, even now many have not been classified. The most characteristic are as unlike as possible to our delicate evanescent wild flowers at home; strongly growing, determined, having adapted themselves, by becoming wiry or leathery, to all exigencies of heat or drought. The banksia, for instance, looked as if a fir-cone had suddenly burst into bristling pink flowers; the hard cone of it is called by the natives a “mungite,” and is used to kindle fire. Some unobservant person once told the West Australians that their birds were all songless, their flowers all scentless, and being naturally self-depreciatory, they have quoted it ever since. The bird-notes are very beautiful and clear in quality of tone; the note of the magpie will at once occur to the most casual observer, to quote only one instance. Old Dampier, in 1699, on his first landing in Western Australia was struck with “the small birds, all singing with great variety of fine shrill notes.” He mentions too, being observant, as befits an explorer, “the small flowers growing on the ground, that were sweet and beautiful,” and where else is there a better description of the eucalyptus “sweet-scented and reddish within the bark,” and “with long narrow leaves ... on one side whitish and on the other green.” But the “racoons” (kangaroos) which were so numerous as to be easily caught, and were “very good meat,” are now but rarely to be seen, where he first sighted them.
Cottesloe Beach, our headquarters while we were in Western Australia, is a pleasant seaside suburb, with, as its name suggests, an immense beach of finest white sand, lapped by smooth waters and protected by Rottnest Island from ocean storms. The cliffs of Rottnest Island, showing yellowish in the bright sunshine, with the white needle of the lighthouse sharply defined are the first sight of land as ships approach West Australia.
The half an hour’s railway journey to Perth runs through other little garden suburbs, for all Australian towns straggle out for many miles into the country, and cover a very large extent of ground. Space is unlimited, and nobody’s domain large or small, need elbow that of his neighbour. The little train on its narrow gauge railway rattles past roads of one-storied houses, standing on their piles; each with its verandah, and sloping iron roof, each surrounded by its palisaded garden, with its purple kennedya, its pink geranium and wattle, each with its inevitable tall grey iron water-tank; somewhere about there is sure to be an array of the ubiquitous kerosene tin, utilised either as a pail, a basket, a flower-box, or all three. We saw them used to form chimneys, even to construct a raft. These suburbs have an air of having loose ends left hanging out. It is all so new; there is no time to attend to details when time is so essentially money. So bordering the low fences are rough undergrowth and gum trees and banksias, and coarse wiry grass—the beginning and the end of the bush.