The Australian Bush Fullerton, Mary E. (1868-1946) A digital text sponsored by University of Sydney Library Sydney 2003 http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/p00026 © University of Sydney Library. The texts and images are not to be used for commercial purposes without permission Source Text: Prepared from the print edition published by J. M. Dent and Sons London and Toronto 1928 242pp. All quotation marks are retained as data. First Published: 1928 DD37440 Australian Etext Collections at women writers essays 1910-1939 The Australian Bush London and Toronto J. M. Dent and Sons 1928 To the Memory of the stout-hearted. — The pioneer Men and Women of the Bush. Preface RUPERT BROOKE, urged by some premonition that the world and its wonders were never going to be quite the same again, visited the Antipodes in the last weeks of such peace as he was to know; and finding himself at Auckland, wrote home describing his impressions of the place. It struck him as odd that he should be able to eat strawberries there at Christmas time. And that quaint conjunction of old associations made more piquant for him a further oddity. New Zealand, he goes on to relate, “turns out to be almost exactly like England.” Obviously, he had not expected that. No home-keeping Englishman does, even to-day when New Zealand is still more like England than it was in 1914. So, in their various and characteristic ways, all the other far places where our English kin foregather are growing more like England: far places set along the trails blazed by their forefathers, to whose courage and hardihood our “dominion over palm and pine” persists in testifying. But the pioneers have passed on, their day is over, their young posterity is concerned less with empire-building than empire-keeping. In no Jingo sense, however, England has expanded, more than ever so since Rupert Brooke ate his Yuletide strawberries in New Zealand, and was moved to a gentle astonishment. But that expansion is not traceable on the post-war maps. It is the times that have changed, not the territories. Mostly, it is the women of our race who have brought the change about. Regiments, armies of them, are engaged in building up new Englands overseas within territorial confines plotted before they were born. In Malaya, Ceylon, India, in South, West and East Africa, I have myself seen the evidences of it. In Australia, New Zealand and Canada, other people have done likewise, and rendered me their testimony. Consider our tropical dependencies. In the old days — we speak of them thus, but all we mean is just before the war — only the senior members of British mercantile firms were as a rule married men. Now even the juniors on their first agreements not infrequently are married, and bring their wives out. This is equally true of planters, and almost equally so of the civil, military, and technical services. Various factors have combined to make this possible. Better rates of pay all round, improvement in health conditions, leave arrangements, hill-stations, and possibly educational facilities, provision of wives' passages, and so forth. Boards of directors and government committees have taken counsel, and arrived at the practical, business-like conclusion to employ married men by preference because it pays better. What has followed is simply an Empire-wide social revolution, accomplished virtually in no time, and never yet properly chronicled. All over, as one might say, bar the shouting. Take Kipling's India as one example. It no longer exists. Take any other dominion, colony, or dependency of the British Empire, seek out any old stager, draw him aside, and listen to his strange tale of chances and changes that he probably finds bewildering. There is a new life — an English life — pulsing in these places that requires to be apprehended and recorded, as vividly and authoritatively as may be, by historians whose knowledge is at the same time wide, intimate, and fresh. So many people are longing to hear about it — travellers and emigrants in esse or in posse, their friends at home — all wanting to know things that the best and brightest of travel-books, the most crammed and earnest of guide-books, can never quite succeed in conveying. For them the OUTWARD BOUND books have been planned and written. ASHLEY GIBSON. Some Recent Books about Australia Brady, E. J. Australia Unlimited. Melbourne, 1917. Bryce, Viscount. Modern Democracies. London, 1921. Fox, Sir Frank. Australia. London, 1927. Johns, Fred. Who's Who in Australia. Sydney, 1922. Jose, A. W., and Carter, H.J. Australian Encyclopaedia (2 vols.). Sydney, 1925. Huntington, Ellsworth. West of the Pacific. New York, 1925. Smith, Sir Ross. Fourteen Thousand Miles through the Air. London, 1922. Author's Preface I FEEL that the quantity and variety of the material to be dealt with, the immense ground to be covered in the survey, renders it impossible for me in the space available to do full justice to my subject. The idea aimed at, however, has been to indicate rather than to exhaust, and avoiding as far as possible mere catalogues and brain-fagging statistics, to give an account of the past, present and potential future of my beloved Australia, written in a readable way. In some important respects the great southern Commonwealth is unique among the British possessions. In its geographical extent it is more than twenty-five times as large as Great Britain; in its geographical position it is many days' steam farther from the centre of the Empire than any other of the great parts. The climate of Australia embraces every kind created by, and presided over by, our sun. Consequently the soils of the continent differ widely, and the nature of their products in the various parts. So, too, the human product is distinctive, physically and psychologically. The bush stamps her native. The art, the literature, the institutions of the country, are likewise distinctive and manifold in the making. These facts, and others, make the field to be gone over an extensive and a complex one. My necessary limitations, though an ardent lover of my country, and as such I hope possessed of some degree of understanding of it, make me unable to lay claim to an absolute knowledge regarding much of what is treated in the following pages. A good deal of research work has had to be done, and where error may have crept in from lack of personal experience and first-hand knowledge, mercy is craved. Where doctors differ, who shall agree? The varying statements of authorities sometimes make but the light that darkens. Thus it was, for instance, not possible to state the actual ascertained number of varieties of the genus Eucalyptus, Australia's most distinctive tree, except by a wide approximation. In historical matters, also, a choice between two or more opposing statements had occasionally to be made. However, in the object aimed at, to give a general view of the Australian bush, its native life, animal and vegetable, and most of all of its human types, native black and white pioneer, for readers desirous of knowing something about these things — especially for the traveller and the migrator — such inadvertencies do not greatly matter. What does matter is the authenticity of the picture as a whole, the veracity of the representations made. For these I take full responsibility. M. E. F. Acknowledgement To Mr. E. J. Brady in his various writings I am indebted for much, and he has my grateful thanks. The scattered nature of my sources of information makes it difficult, and indeed hardly necessary, to acknowledge my debt to others in detail. M. E. F. The Call of the Bush To his long task he sets his hand, In battle with the Tyrant Wild; And lo! by ways none understand She makes of him her loving child. She sets her mark upon her son, Baptises him in all her dyes, Until subduing and subdued Have mingled deep their destinies. Or wander he, her voice recalls, In the still night when naught's astir; Or far or near he rises up, Or joy or pain goes back to her. The Australian Bush Australia AUSTRALIA was the last of the great continents to yield up the contours of its coastline to the map of the world. Until Captain Cook planted the British flag on the shores of Botany Bay in 1769 the new Southern land had remained much of a mystery to the adventurous mariners of Europe. It was a period of discovery following on a still greater era of romantic exploration of seas unknown. Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, they had all seen (and sailed away again) some portion of the shoreline of the mysterious continent. The general report of these various mariners was that the land sighted was a barren island inhabited by cruel savages. Most of them had a warm reception from the natives, and had no opportunity to penetrate into the country itself. Captain James Cook himself was embroiled in immediate trouble with the natives when his little vessel, the Endeavour, anchored by the beautiful and now famous harbour of Port Jackson. He, however, did not beat a retreat altogether, but remained to prospect the coast. He took his vessel northward to Moreton Bay, charting the waters and observing the land as he went. In all, he skirted thirteen hundred miles of the eight thousand of the Australian coastline, enough to prove that the strange country was no mere island, and that the land was not a barren waste. The eastern coast disposed of the idea that those, such as Dirk Hartog, and others arriving at the west coast, had received.