On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

Quite the most beautiful piece of country within easy reach of Melbourne is, to my mind, to be found along the Healesville line. By the time that Croydon is reached, one hour only from the city, the scenery becomes completely rural. Here at least there is not the faintest hint of melancholy to be seen. The lie of the land is delightfully undulating. At every turn of the line one catches sight of compact little orchards, and gardens, and prosperous homesteads. There are trees everywhere, and peeps of the clear blue of the Dandenong ranges between them.

It is indeed all “a dimplement of ups and downs,” a prosperous, smiling land. In the early spring, when the orchards are out, and hillsides and valleys are white with plum-blossom, and the wattle runs a line of pure yellow along every hedgerow, rioting out in places, from sheer exuberance of growth, into veritable forest trees, each like a bouquet of yellow bloom; then, indeed, there is little of sadness to be seen, and if any is felt, it is but that we cannot renew our youth in common with Nature.

From Croydon upwards the valleys grow deeper, the hills higher, the paddocks wider; the whole country less snug and compact. One passes vineyards, the largest belonging to Victoria’s adored Madame Melba; and beautifully fenced and kept pasture-land, part of the estates of the prima donna’s father, Mr. Mitchell, famous not only for his daughter, but—quaint enough contrast—for his pigs and his bacon factory. The trees are big here, and cast wide-stretching shadows, beneath which the cattle congregate during the heat of the day. How I wish I could paint the landscape! It is all a study in pastel tints, with none of the crude primary colours seen in tropical regions, no vivid scarlets or emerald greens. The distant hills are grey-blue, the middle distance a brownish-blue, the fields, even in spring, of a yellowish tint, save where they are blotted by velvety shades. The gum-trees, here in the open, are very large and beautifully proportioned, with their huge limbs growing to within four feet or so of the ground; and the foliage is grey, or golden, or brown, or shaded with madder tints—but never an absolute green; while over all hangs for the most part a delicate shimmer of heat, the colour of the palest blue larkspur.

Finally, as you disembark at Healesville Station the arms of the hills enfold you, while in every direction around you swell the bosoms and shoulders of them, deep with massed trees. The township itself is clean and cheerful, yet inclined to stuffiness; so one hires a horse and buggy and drives farther afield up the mountain-side, or else adventures one’s life in the public motor—which has replaced, within my memory of Australia, the tranquil old coach—and starts away up over the Black’s Spur, along a road which follows the actual track made by the aboriginals in those days when they divided the forest ranges among themselves—the opossum, the native bear, and kangaroo.

Better abjure the motor, though—it is a brute—and, waiting until it and its smell are past, hire a couple of horses at the hotel and drive up the mountain far enough in its wake to be able to forget it.

The road is wide, and for a while it runs along comparatively level ground, in one place crossing a bridge, and passing a wilderness of overgrown gardens, where some earlier settlers’ dwellings must have been, and where there is still a lilac-bush that blossoms bravely each spring, and pink monthly roses, and clumps of fuchsias, a few rough broken walls and a blackened hearthstone—a melancholy sight this, that all the gallant gaiety of the flowers fails to modify.

Then the road begins to wind steeply upwards, up and up. Every now and then one catches the delicious sound of running water from the jealously guarded stream that helps to supply Melbourne. As the forest grows more dense the trees rise higher and higher in their efforts to catch the light, their white-skinned forms hung with long, russet-tinted rags and tatters of bark. Such trees! One’s eye follows them upwards with a feeling that is little short of worship—not for the trees themselves, though one might adore worse gods, but for the something pure and elevating to which they seem to lift one. Surely no cathedral ever built with hands could be so sacred or awe-inspiring as this sanctuary of the woods, with its tapering white pillars, some as much as 300 feet in height.

Far above one, on the right as one winds up the tortuous road, tower these giant gums, their very roots adapting themselves to the steep graduate; those on the highest part of the slope short and sturdy, stuck out like feet at an acute angle to the trunk. The tap-root thick and straight, and the roots on the lower slopes long and slender like ropes, while beneath them flourish a mass of saplings and tree-ferns. To the left one looks down on a sea of green, out of which the tallest of them stretch white arms, and now and then, as the road turns, one catches a glimpse of more mountains, blue with distance; or a stretch of hillside where the trees have been stripped by fire, or ring-barked, and stand all naked and ashen white, strangely glacial in appearance, against the blue background.