Читать книгу Rambles in Australia - Edwin Sharpe Grew - Страница 9

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One great source of wealth to Western Australia are the karri forests, covering thousands of square miles. Karri is a kind of eucalyptus closely allied to the better-known jarrah, one of the hardest woods in existence. It has been used at home to pave the streets of London. In all but one respect karri is as good as jarrah, its only point of inferiority is that it cannot be employed for underground purposes, while jarrah can be left under water for twenty years without being any the worse for it. Karri has to be specially prepared—“powellised” is the technical term—and that is an expensive process. Otherwise it is almost impossible to tell the two woods apart, except by the ash after burning.

Western Australia asserts that its karri trees are the tallest in the world, though Victorians make the same claim for the giant gums of Gippsland. So far these Gippsland trees have been proved to be the tallest in Australia. The official measurements are: height, 326 feet 1 inch; girth, 25 feet 7 inches; measured six feet from the ground.4 Their dimensions are surpassed by the Californian redwood, which have been found attaining a height of 340 feet; but whatever the actual measurements, the effect of the immense height of the Australian trees is everywhere imposing enough to warrant competitive statements concerning it.

Remote from all habitation, the difficulties in the way of felling and transporting the karri are very great, and the Western Australian Government have in consequence established some state sawmills about two hundred miles up-country, in the heart of the primeval, uncleared forest. It is the nucleus of a new township called Big Brook. Australia has not shown herself altogether felicitous in her nomenclature, for generally it is neither original nor descriptive, except where native names have been adopted, which, if not euphonious, have a meaning.

We had the good fortune to be in Perth on the occasion of an official visit organised by the Government. Australian trains always run at night, and so avoid much tedium and loss of time. After an early dinner, we started from Perth at 7.30 for Big Brook in a special train.

The line, like all Western Australian railways, was laid on a narrow gauge, with the result that the carriages jolted and rocked like a small boat in a storm. An odd little characteristic feature of West Australian travelling is that at the end of each carriage is suspended a canvas water-bag, with a cup attached to it. They are also seen hanging in verandahs, impressing on the stranger that he is in a dry and thirsty land, where water is always precious.

One of the advantages of the Western Australian climate is that the nights are cool, though the spring sunshine was intensely hot. Whoever organised this Government visit to the sawmills had a very high standard of comfort, for from first to last it was most admirably arranged. We were a small but very pleasant little party, and met and talked in the friendly Australian way, in each other’s compartments. About nine o’clock a light supper was brought round, and we soon after went to bed and fitfully to sleep under a mountain of rugs. Whenever the train stopped there was a loud chorus of frogs from unseen swamps.

We were called next morning by the conductor bringing us tea, and later, while we were dressing, he came round with fruit. We woke to find ourselves already in the depths of the forest among the soaring white trunks of the karri, the early sun tinging their smooth trunks with red. The line had been recently made, and the sleeping cars were very heavy, so we proceeded slowly. There was very little sign of life; we could almost feel the great deep silence of the forest, moist, and fresh, and cold, in the frost of early morning, for it lies 400 feet above the sea level, and the temperature was very different from that of the dry sandy plains of Perth. At long intervals solitary wooden houses stood in little clearings, with grave-eyed children before the doorway, shading their eyes to watch the unfamiliar passage of a big train. More seldom we came upon a scattered village of tents, roughly put up like a gipsy encampment, pitched among the damp undergrowth. There was something pathetic in the deep isolation of these pioneers, though the near neighbourhood of the railway made their lives almost metropolitan, compared with those of many Australian settlers.

As we drew nearer to our journey’s end, we passed an occasional small clearing, where the yellow sandy soil had already been planted with apple trees for the fruit growing, which is one of the industries of the future for Western Australia; or patches of forest had been ringbarked,5 and left to die, after the cheap but wasteful method of clearing in use. Visitors to Australia cannot help being impressed with the waste of timber, which seems appalling to an inhabitant of an over-populated northern country, where everything grows slowly, and every inch of wood has its economic value. They are too ready to rush into print, or public pronouncements, on a subject of which only prolonged residence in the country, and a more than superficial study of its economic problems, could enable them to judge. In the first place the cost of transport is prohibitive, or means of transport may even be non-existent; and secondly, in a new country time is money. Great tracts of forest all over Australia are ringbarked and left to rot. In the Government sawmills at Big Brook, the debris of the great karri trees is lost. There is wholesale waste, wholesale destruction of timber going on in Australia, the least intelligent observer cannot fail to mark it, but time is literally money in Australia. “We can’t afford to wait,” said one of the leading statesmen of Western Australia, commenting on the waste of timber at Big Brook. “We sacrifice five pounds to gain twenty,” said one of the shrewdest and best-informed officials of Victoria.

By the common process of ringbarking, dead trees are left standing over great areas of forest land, vast white skeleton armies, a strange and desolate sight. If the land is to be used for arable purposes, the trees have to be removed; but for pasture, when the trees are dead, and can no longer deprive the grass of nourishment and moisture, they remain standing for years, till in time with the process of the seasons, and the attacks of insects, the hard wood decays and crumbles away. Thus the destruction of forests goes on in order to provide timber for building; for fencing, mining, fuel, as well as for commercial purposes of export, or to improve, or create, arable or pasture land. In Western Australia besides, green timber is cut for fuel, in the neighbourhood of the goldfields, because of the scarcity of coal, but natural reafforestation is usually allowed to proceed. However, when all these necessities are admitted, there has been a deplorable waste of timber, the want of which is already felt in settled districts; and it is hoped that further wanton destruction will be prevented, and replanting will be undertaken by all the states. Official opinion is becoming alive to the importance of the question to the future history of Australia. Victoria and New South Wales are doing some planting, but South Australia is the only state in which forest plantation is being carried on on a large scale.6

The railway ended abruptly in a large clearing in the forest about fifteen miles from the coast and two hundred miles from Perth. The air was that of a keen autumn morning, and we climbed down from our carriages, for there was of course no platform, feeling stiff and chilly, to find breakfast waiting for us in a big wooden hall, with a great fire blazing in the kitchen, which opened out of it, the most cheering and comfortable sight in the wilderness. These halls are a feature of backwood settlements in Australia; they are utilised for all social and business purposes, and are the common meeting ground of the community. In this instance the landlord leased the building from the state, and provided meals for the men employed in the sawmills. He invited us to inspect his pleasant kitchen, the floor sanded with sweet-smelling, deep-red sawdust. At the back he was putting up bedrooms in small detached one-storied wooden buildings. Big Brook with its keen, pure air, the sweet, clean scent of the fresh-sawn wood, and all round, the illimitable forest, mysterious and impenetrable, would be an ideal resting-place, if anyone in Australia were ever over-worked.

But meanwhile breakfast was waiting for us, a never-to-be-forgotten breakfast of good coffee, hot rolls, porridge, new-laid eggs, and chops the tenderest in the world, the product of the local sheep. Fig jam, with which it concluded, was excellent. Figs grow readily in Western Australia, and produce abundant crops of fruit. They were very noticeable at this time of year, as they were the only deciduous tree.

After breakfast we visited the whole settlement, which of course was built entirely of wood. In the school, in a bright, cheerful classroom, a master was conducting the tiny classes of well-dressed, rosy-cheeked children. Opposite the school was a billiard-room, where the men could meet in the evenings; there was also a bank, and a post office. We were impressed by the splendid physique of the men; they were as agile as cats, muscular and supple; and these qualities were necessary, for the work is very dangerous from the moment the axe is laid to the root of the tree. The logs are of immense weight, they bound and crash down the incline to the back of the mill, when they are unloaded from the truck, and fly asunder with great force when they are sawn. The log, or trunk of the tree is first sawn in two longitudinally, and is then again cut into smaller and smaller slices, till it becomes planks. The saws are graduated, becoming more and more fine. The task of keeping them true is an accomplishment of great delicacy, it is one man’s work; he corrects deviations in the metal with a hammer, judging them entirely by eye.

In the neighbourhood of the sawmill all the air is filled with flying sawdust, and the sweet scent of the freshly sawn wood. The dust falls to the ground in deep red masses, the flying chips look like scraps of raw meat, but the rich colour fades when they dry. The process of preparing the karri wood for use is at present a very expensive one. The planks have to be stewed in order to preserve them. They are put for this purpose into immense tanks of molasses, and left seething there to harden. It is hoped that scientific experiment may evolve a less costly method. After going over the mills we were taken up a little railway line into the forest to see a tree felled. We sat on benches on trucks behind the engine, which carried a supply of wood for its boiler, for the cost of bringing coal up to Big Brook would be quite prohibitive. Even the boilers that work the mills are fed with wood. The engine was run by a magnificent-looking old stoker with a white beard and the air of a patriarch. When we scrambled off the trucks on to the soft, rich earth of the forest, we had to wait to let a bullock team go by, twenty-four of them pulling one log with a big metal “shoe” on the end to prevent its digging into the ground. The passage left a deep slide in the red earth. The bullocks are bound together in twos by very uncomfortable-looking, heavy wooden yokes, and their progress is punctuated by frightful yells and cracking of whips from the drivers.

FELLING KARRI.

We had not far to walk; the sun was now almost oppressively hot, and the steamy atmosphere was full of the rich, moist smell of the damp earth and the undergrowth. The woodcutters, who fell these immense trees, are so skilled that they can gauge the exact spot on which they will fall to within a few inches; such accuracy is a matter of life and death in tree-felling. When we arrived on the scene the great trunk of the karri was already sawn through by two men working on a kind of little platform erected round it. For an instant the slim, white tree tottered, while we held our breath, then it began to fall slowly, at first with a crackling sound; finally it came crashing and tearing its way among the neighbouring trees, followed by a shower of leaves; there was a sound as of the firing of a big gun; all the earth trembled; it seemed, as if the whole vast silence of the forest was shaken. A second tree that we saw felled measured one hundred and fifty-eight feet to the first fork.

The woodcutters are paid by the load that the bullocks draw, the bare trunk of the tree when its branches have been lopped off. We were told that they can make as much as £6 a week. The cost of living does not amount to much more than 25s. a week for a single man, as he can board sumptuously at the Hall for 22s., and the price of lodgings is about 1s. 6d. This leaves a considerable surplus, and in Big Brook there is no means of spending money. In consequence, men occasionally go off to the nearest town when they have amassed a small capital, and stay there till it is all spent, and they have nothing to show for it. They work eight hours a day, and everything is regulated by contract. They are of various nationalities, but all of magnificent physique. While we were waiting to remount our railway trucks, a team of forty-eight bullocks passed, dragging one enormous log of twenty tons weight, the drivers cracking their long whips, screaming and leaping into the air in a frenzy of inarticulate excitement that somehow conveyed a meaning to the bullocks. Soon after we began the return journey we passed through a belt of jarrah, the still harder kind of eucalyptus that we had only seen in the form of piles; the trunks were reddish instead of white like the karri.

We saw also for the first time a common feature of the Western Australian bush, the curious “Black Boys,” called in Queensland “grass trees.” They look like a knotted dead trunk with bulrushes growing on the top in thick bunches. Sometimes the trunk is forked, and there are a pair of odd bushy heads on one black misshapen trunk.

The bush in this part of Australia has little diversity. The keen air of the early morning had made us very hungry, in spite of so substantial a breakfast, and we were not sorry to reach Jarraduck, the settlement in the forest where lunch was waiting in another large wooden hall. The long tables were decorated with masses of golden wattle and purple kennedya. Lunches of this kind, and we sampled very many, are always just alike, varying only with the resources of the neighbourhoods,—lots of flowers and a warm welcome, plates of assorted cold meats, of which turkey is an almost inevitable ingredient; elaborate sweets, of which one is always an excellent trifle, and fruit of the district, in this case the small, sweet, thick-skinned local orange.

The refined-looking, sweet-faced landlady seemed inappropriate to the rough surroundings. “We shall just stay here till we can better ourselves,” she explained. A few more hours brought us out of the forest, there were more clearings, homesteads became more frequent, the red soil was freshly ploughed for oats, orchards began to take the place of the eucalyptus, with apple trees not yet in blossom, and orange and lemon trees covered with fruit. The country became hilly, and half-castes were at work in the fields, shock-headed, and unintelligent-looking. We had left the bush behind, and were now in the region of an older settlement, the fruit-growing district of Western Australia. Fruit-growing is becoming one of the most important factors of Western Australian industry, and it is hoped that it will prove an even greater source of prosperity, because a more permanent one, than the gold that cannot last for ever. The climate, and much of the soil in the South-West are admirably adapted for all kinds of fruit-growing. The apples are excellent, so are the oranges, pears, plums, apricots, and peaches, strawberries and gooseberries, all of which are grown successfully. Fruit-growers, who have taken care in selecting a holding where the soil and conditions are favourable for their crops, have not long to wait before reaping their profits, as six-year-old apple trees have been known to produce from £50 to £60 an acre. It is important also to select a fruit for growing that will travel and keep. In 1913 there were still more than 88,000 acres suitable for the cultivation of fruit or vine-growing, subdivided into convenient blocks and waiting for selectors.

Bridgetown is the centre of the fruit-growing district of Western Australia. Motor-cars were waiting to show us the neighbourhood, and we started in the golden light of the late afternoon sun to see something of the country. It was our first experience of Australian motorists. To enjoy motoring in Australia one must have an adventurous disposition. Except in the neighbourhood of large towns the roads are very rough; indeed, the long droughts make it impossible that they should be otherwise. The soft, dry soil crumbles away, the light dust is stirred up by every passing vehicle, leaving deep ruts, so that the same road is often on different levels, and a car runs along at a sharp angle, with one wheel poised on the edge of a rut, and the other in a hollow. Practised drivers achieve this difficult accomplishment with much skill and the minimum of jolting, but even so, the car often takes flying leaps. So we started on an apparently breakneck career, holding tight on to the sides of the motor, and dashed up and down hills that an English motorist would have hesitated to look at, red and rutty as a Devonshire lane in winter. We never knew the name of that kindly motorist, who so gallantly risked his own and our lives, not to mention his machine, in showing us as much as possible of the surrounding country before the light faded. He was one of the many, many unknown friends who did us some passing kindness on our rapid journey, leaving only a warm memory behind it. Hail and farewell to each and all of them!

The country-side was very beautiful, more English, and less unfamiliar-looking, than anything we had yet seen, with steeply undulating hills and valleys, springing young green crops, and orchards, with apple trees whitened against some parasitical scab, or oranges and lemons. The comfortable homesteads had a more finished and abiding air than anything we had yet seen; for Bridgetown, as our host explained to us, “is a very old settlement—sixty years old!” It even possessed a tiny stone church, which gave it a pleasantly homely and established air. We crossed the beautiful Blackwood river by a picturesque wooden bridge where the river flows through a deep gorge up which black and white wild duck were sailing. In the fading glow of the sunset the country looked still more English, for the groups of gum trees that crowned the hills were indistinguishable, and the evening light seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of calm contentment over the thriving country-side, as of a day’s work well done. We ran through the little scattered township, to the Freemason’s Hotel, at which our friend the motorist deposited us, and vanished into the dusk.

OXEN HARNESSED TO A LOG AT BIG BROOK.

As we went in out of the darkness one of our fellow-travellers brought us a specimen of the pretty, curious “kangaroo paw,” a flower that looks as if it had been cut out of bright red and green moss, whose buds take the exact shape of a kangaroo’s little foot. After dinner we strolled along the broad, silent country road, leading out into the deep stillness beyond, broken only by the barking of the village dogs, and the croaking of unseen frogs. The men of the neighbourhood loitered in the light of the shop windows, kindly looking and highly curious. We met at Bridgetown a Government official at the head of the Fruit-growing Department. He told us that this corner of South-Western Australia, a district as large as the state of Victoria, was the finest soil for fruit-growing in the whole state. The industry was of very recent growth, the first trial shipment was only made ten years ago, but since 1907 the trade had been established upon a commercial basis, and the export of apples was greatly increasing every year in quantity.

Western Australia has also successfully exported grapes, but unfortunately the manufacture of wine is now on the decline. A very delicate and pleasant chablis is produced there. We tasted two kinds, a pale, and a warmly coloured golden chablis. They compared favourably with the light wines of Italy, and though like them, they would probably lose all their character and flavour after being fortified for export, they could be grown for home consumption. The explanation of the decline given to us at Bridgetown was that since Federation, and the abolition of inter-state customs, growers cannot afford to mature their wines sufficiently to compete with the longer established trade of the Eastern states. It is hoped that raisins and currants may be produced, and the climate is also suitable for the growth of olives; the evergreen trees would serve the further purpose of affording shade for the cattle. Our return journey was made successfully and uneventfully, and we slept soundly, only awaking occasionally, to find ourselves being shot to and fro like shuttles in a spinning mill; and arrived home to breakfast at Cottesloe Beach.