To our parents, Australia was a stranger land, and they were sojourners here. Though they lived here, they did not get close enough to it to appreciate fully its natural beauty and its charm. To us, and especially to our children, children of Australian-born parents, children whose bones were made in Australia, the place is home. To them Nature makes a direct appeal, strengthened by those most powerful of all associations, those gathered in childhood, when the foundations of their minds were laid. The English boy, out on a breezy down, may feel an exaltation of soul on hearing a Skylark raining down a flood of delicious melody from far up at heaven's gate, but his joy is no whit greater than his who hears, in the dewy freshness of the early morning, the carol of the Magpie ringing out over an Australian plain. To those who live in countries where the winter is long and bitter, any sign that the genial time of flowers is at hand is very welcome. All over the countryside the first call of the Cuckoo, spring's harbinger, arouses the keenest delight in expectant listeners. This delight is, however, more than mere delight in the bird's song. And to those brought up with it year by year there comes a time when the call of the Cuckoo stirs something deep down below the surface of ordinary emotion. It is the resultant of multitudes of childhood experiences and of associations with song and story. I first heard the Cuckoo in Epping Forest one delicious May evening four years ago. It charmed me, but my delight was almost wholly that of association. All the English poetry I knew was at the back of the bird's song. Here in Australia we have no sharply-defined seasons, yet I find myself every spring listening eagerly for the first plaintive, insistent call of the Pallid Cuckoo. For me his song marks another milestone passed.
Marcus Clarke wrote of the Laughing Jackasses as bursting into "horrible peals of semi-human laughter." But then Marcus Clarke was English-bred, and did not come to Australia till he was eighteen years old. It makes all the difference in our appreciation of bird or tree or flower to have known it as a boy. I venture to think no latter-day Australian who has grown up with our Kookaburra can have any but the kindliest of feelings for this feathered comedian. For myself, I confess that I find his laughter infectious, and innumerable times he has provoked me into an outburst as hearty and as mirthful as his own. More than half of our pleasure is due to the fact that the bird is
"The same that in my schoolboy days I listened to."
and to such a one we can say—
"I can listen to thee yet,
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again."
It is time that we Australians fought against the generally received opinion that the dominant note of our scenery is weird melancholy. This is the note sounded mainly by those who were bred elsewhere, who came to us with other associations and other traditions, and sojourned among us. It will not be the opinion of the native-born when they find appropriate speech.
"Whence doth the mournful keynote start?