AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND
AND
SOME ISLANDS OF THE SOUTH SEAS
CHAPTER I
JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START
For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide—
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried!
STARTING on a trip to Australia gives one for the moment the feeling expressed in Kipling’s lines. The “Never-Never Land,” as it is called, is so far away, the voyage is so long, and thoughts of the to-be-discovered continent are so full of dreary anticipation! The vast stretches of desert, the monotonous reaches of forests where the trees shed their bark and the silence is broken only by the harsh cry of the “laughing jackass,” or kookooburra bird, the fearful dryness, and the awful heat—these things of which one reads so much in the books about the country do not make pleasant pictures in the mind of the traveller.
One can go to Australia in three weeks on a comfortable steamer from Seattle, San Francisco, or Vancouver; my own trip, however, was taken after a long, hot stay in the Philippines and a leisurely drifting from there past Borneo and down the coast of Cochin-China to Singapore and Java. At Batavia I caught a little tramp steamer bound for the East on a route passing through the Dutch East Indies to Torres Strait, Thursday Island, and New Guinea, and thence going southward inside the Great Barrier Reef to Brisbane in Queensland.
The itinerary looked interesting, the voyage venturesome, and as I walked on board my heart sang. A day or so later it wept. The meat was atrocious, the bread soggy, the rancid butter oil, and the water lukewarm and bitter. As a whole, my fellow voyagers were no better than the food. For the most part they were a motley crowd of dirty Hindoos and Malays, with the flotsam and jetsam, blacks, browns, and whites found scattered throughout the islands.