The scenery on this trip is worth noticing. A part of the way is over mountains and across rolling grazing lands. Some of the ride was through forests of eucalyptus trees, always and in all their numerous varieties called “gums” by the Australians. The leaves of the trees seemed to me to hang down as though in mourning and most of them had lost half their bark. The old bark was black and hung in long streamers down the trunks like dishevelled hair, while the new bark, white or silver-gray, looked very pretty by contrast.
In some places there were groves of dead trees. They had been ringed with the axe to kill them for clearing and stood stark and gray without leaves or bark. In the glare of the bright sun their limbs looked like clean and well-polished bones. A dead Australian forest is a veritable skeleton forest, the deadest-looking thing in nature. Where the trees have been felled the stumps are perfectly white, the logs lying on the ground are white, and the whole makes one think of a bone yard.
When we passed over the Darling Downs we travelled for miles across green fields as flat as a floor surrounded by wire fences, which enclosed great flocks of fat sheep and herds of sleek cattle. On the ploughed lands the soil was as black as that of the Nile Valley and the dark ground looked soft and velvety in the brilliant sunlight. We crossed tracts each of a hundred acres and more of luxuriant alfalfa, and again went through fields where the green blades of wheat were just poking their tips up through the dark earth. Where a stream had made a deep cut I could see that the rich top soil was many feet in depth.
There were but few farm outbuildings, no big barns, and no farmhouses of any great size. The homes were one-story cottages of wood painted yellow and roofed with galvanized iron. In spite of Australia’s huge forests, wood is still expensive and galvanized iron is largely used. Most of the houses had big round iron tanks on their porches to catch the rain from the roofs. Many had galvanized iron chimneys, and a few were built entirely of this material, which is imported from England.
I noticed that some of the cottages were set high up on iron piles capped by iron saucers with rims turned down, in the same way that the American farmer protects his granary from the rats. The upturned saucers are used to keep out the white ants which will devour almost any wood or leather they can get hold of. In tropical Queensland the piles have another advantage; for they permit a circulation of air under the houses, cooling the floors.
Bondi Beach, near Sydney, is the resort of thousands. Though sometimes accused of overdoing it, the devotion of the Australians to outdoor pleasures has helped make them a healthy, vigorous people.
The water traffic of Sydney harbour centres at the Circular Quay, where all the ferries dock, and the street-car lines converge. The ferry system is one of the largest and most efficient in the world.
