Synopsis Australia, New Zealand and Some Islands of the South Seas by : Frank George Carpenter
The Australians say their country is the biggest thing south of the Equator, and what I have seen here makes me think that they are right. Australia is as big as the United States without Alaska, twenty-five times larger than Great Britain and Ireland, fifteen times the size of France, and three fourths as large as all Europe. It is a country of magnificent distances, being longer from east to west than the distance from New York to Salt Lake, and wider from north to south than from New York to Chicago. By the fastest trains, Brisbane is thirty-six hours from Sydney, and Sydney is eighteen hours from Melbourne. It takes three days and eighteen hours to make the trip by rail from Melbourne on the southeast to Perth on the southwest coast. Australia is also a land great in its resources. Since gold was discovered there in 1851, it has produced five billion dollars’ worth of the precious metal. Gold has been found all over the continent—in the mountains, on the farms, and in the sands of the deserts. Yet the greater part of the country has never been prospected, vast areas have not even been explored, and new gold mines may be discovered any day. It is known that the continent contains great quantities of iron, and tin has been extensively mined. There is coal in every state and the deposits of New South Wales, the only ones that have been well surveyed, are estimated to contain more than one billion tons. The coal beds of the state of Queensland are believed to be inexhaustible. Silver, too, is found in all the states, and the Broken Hill mines of New South Wales are among the richest of the world. More important than its mineral wealth, however, are the pastoral and agricultural riches of Australia. Enormous flocks of sheep pasture on the sweet grasses of thousands upon thousands of her acres. She produces some of the best wool on earth and exports a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth annually. Her wheat lands produce enough for the needs of her five and a half million people and furnish one hundred million bushels for export. It is estimated that with close settlement she can raise one billion bushels, or sufficient to feed a population of one hundred and fifty millions. Dairying is now one of the largest of her industries and sixty million dollars’ worth of Australian butter goes overseas every year. In Australia there are great fertile tracts of land, but there are also vast areas of desert. The well-watered eastern part of the continent is rolling and hilly for about one hundred and fifty miles back from the coast. West of this region lies the country of plains, the first part of which is a belt of prairie lands three hundred miles wide, where there are fine sheep and cattle ranches and wheat and fruit farms. Here, too, is the only real river system of Australia, the Murray-Darling. Near the western border of the plains is the salt Lake Eyre sunk in a depression below sea level. Beyond Lake Eyre, extending almost across the continent to within three hundred miles of the west coast, and to within about the same distance from the ocean on the north and south, is the Great Desert. This has an estimated area of eight hundred thousand square miles, or about one fourth of all Australia. Except in the southwest corner, where gold is mined, there are said to be less than one thousand white people in this arid waste. The air is so dry that one’s fingernails become as brittle as glass, screws come out of boxes, and lead drops out of pencils. I am told there are six-year-old children living in this region who have never seen a drop of rain. Australia is a land of strange things as well as big ones—queer plants, queer animals, and aborigines who are the most backward members of the human race. There are lilies that reach the height of a three-story house, trees that grow grass, and other trees whose trunks bulge out like bottles. In the dense “bush” are mighty eucalyptus trees rising two hundred feet high. They shed their bark instead of their foliage, and the leaves are attached to the stems obliquely instead of horizontally. There are towering tree ferns such as disappeared from the rest of the earth before the Coal Age and are now seen elsewhere only in the fossilized remains of prehistoric times. Two thirds of the animals of Australia, like its famous kangaroo, are marsupials; that is, the females have pouches in which they carry their young. Except for the opossum, and the opossum rat of Patagonia, marsupials occur nowhere else. Stranger than the kangaroo, stranger even than Australia’s wingless bird, the emu, is the platypus, which is found only on this island continent. It has a bill like a duck’s, fur like a seal’s, and a pouch like that of a kangaroo. It is equally at home on the land and in the water. It lays eggs, yet it is a mammal; though a mammal it has no teats, but nourishes its young by means of milk that exudes through pores into its pouch. As for the natives, when William Dampier, the first Englishman to land on the shores of Australia, came here in 1699, he described the aborigines as “the miserablest people in the world, with the unpleasantest looks and the worst features of any people I ever saw. Setting aside their human shape, they differ little from brutes.” Whence these natives came and how long they had been on their island continent none knows. All agree, however, that the bushman, or blackfellow, as he is generally called, is the lowest form of man. Throughout uncounted years he has made no progress. He is without history and without tradition. Contact with civilization kills him. The aborigines of Australia are a dying race, numbering now a scant fifty thousand.
