This was one of the most delightful of all the many crowded days we spent in Australia, for it revealed to us the wonder and the beauty of the Queensland Bush.

We started early for the station through the streets that leave on one’s mind, looking back, an impression of sharply defined black and white, from the contrasting sunlight and shadow in that brilliant atmosphere. The three hours’ journey to Nambour, where we were to see a sugar manufactory, was full of interest. The line passes quite near the curious peaks, which Captain Cook called the Glass House mountains. The origin of the name is conjectural, but it is supposed that the conical shape of some of them resembled the glass-blowing factories in the England of his boyish days. These bare, isolated peaks push themselves up sharply and precipitately from the plain. They are formed of trachyte or some kindred igneous rock, and geologists are not agreed as to their origin among the surrounding sandstone. We saw again many of the grass trees, as they call the Queensland variety of the West Australian “black boy.” The tropical bush begins about fifty miles from Brisbane, where a Government Reserve has been created on either side of the line, which passes through a belt of forest with palms and ferns and richly varied undergrowth. Now and then a little party of men at work on the line would shout clamorously for “papers.” Their only chance of getting news of the outside world is to attract the attention of passengers in the passing trains, and get them to throw out newspapers. The country round here is very rich and fertile, and for the first time we saw pineapple farms. In a good year pineapples can be bought in some parts of Queensland for threepence a dozen, so we were told. They are very good and juicy, and they make a very pleasant form of jam. The plants look like rows of low-growing rushes or very coarse grass.

Towards twelve o’clock the train pulled up between a field of sugar-canes and the Moreton Central Sugar Mill. Sugar is a very handsome crop, when the canes are bearing their tall, feathery flowers. The canes themselves are dark red, jointed like bamboo; the plant is not unlike a very large maize in general effect. Nambour is a centre of the sugar-growing industry, and there are plantations on the slopes of the hills and the banks of the rivers. Two hundred and eighty tons a day are crushed at the Moreton Sugar Mills just outside the town. Its neighbourhood is pervaded by the peculiar sweet, thick, cloying smell of the canes, a smell that can never be forgotten; we recognised cargoes of raw sugar afar off on every wharf and landing-stage and railway station on which we encountered it, during the remainder of our stay in Australia.

The history of sugar-growing here is very interesting. It was started originally on the system of large plantations worked by coloured labour. No other system of working sugar plantations in the tropics was known. Natives were imported from the Pacific Islands. Planters erected their own mills, and conducted their business through managers and overseers. In the early seventies the industry was rapidly developing, but two circumstances intervened to hamper it. The price of cane sugar fell owing to the great increase in the manufacture of beet sugar in Europe; the Government prohibited the employment of coloured labour. These circumstances revolutionised the industry. The large plantations gave place to smaller farms worked by white labour; the farmers received Government grants to enable them to erect co-operative factories; further, a Government bounty was imposed as a compensation for the withdrawal of coloured labour; this was subsequently abolished. The Central Mill System by which groups of farmers control the factories continues. The canes are crushed and the sugar sent to the refiners. The work of manufacture is carried out under scientific supervision, and state sugar experimental stations test the various species of cane, and determine which are most productive, and most immune from disease. Thus the Queensland Sugar Industry is specially interesting, because it has solved the problem of carrying on a tropical manufacture with white labour.

The Moreton Central Sugar Mill, which we visited, is close to the main line of railway, but light railways run in all directions through the district to bring the canes up on trucks to the mill. Masses of dark red cane were lying about round the mill, and coming in on little trucks. The raw cane tastes faintly sour. The sugar mill itself was filled with the all-pervading sickly, thick, sweet smell of the raw sugar, and streaming with moisture. The temperature is very high. We climbed under and over moving machinery, were asphyxiated with steam, nauseated with sweetness, and covered with molasses, all in the pursuit of knowledge.

Still it was a very interesting experience. All processes of manufacture are interesting. The canes are shot in from outside, and crushed by a series of heavy rollers till a thick juice pours out. When this is all extracted the exhausted fibre is burnt in the furnaces. The juice of the cane is boiled in great vats. In its final stages of boiling it is thick and black as tar. It is then run into revolving cylinders, called centrifugalisers. These rotate at a very great rate, and are fascinating to watch, for in a few minutes the dark, sticky mass has disappeared, and the sides of the cylinder are coated with a coarse yellow sugar very much sweeter than that which appears on our tea tables.

We at last emerged from the mill, instructed, but very sticky, and cast about for some spot in which it would be possible to obtain soap and water. There were buildings of some kind close by, warehouses or something of the sort, connected with the station, with two men sitting on the verandah. We asked them if they could tell us the nearest way to soap and water. One of them indicated with his pipe a large galvanised iron tank with a tap in the bottom, and a broken tumbler, but they shook their heads over the problem of soap. We turned on the tap hopefully, but the Australian rainfall was quite inadequate to remove molasses. So we went in search of the Nambour hotel. However new an Australian town may be, it always has an hotel or two, and a sort of communal hall. Nambour has in addition a few shops and some stray cows and horses. We watched a cow eating sugar cane with every manifestation of pleasure. It was not till we got to Queensland, by the way, that we began to see horses everywhere, just as we had imagined them in Australia, hitched up to gates by the bridle.

We made our way to the hotel, where everyone was very busy preparing lunch. There was no hot water upstairs, but, penetrating into the kitchen, where there was a great bustle, and anything extraneous was very much in the way, we succeeded in getting a pudding basin full of hot water and a teacloth, and attacked the molasses in the yard outside, before an audience of poultry. Molasses, however, appears to yield to nothing, not even chemical cleaning. It always re-emerges. So relinquishing the vain attempt, we repaired to lunch.

Whatever you don’t have for lunch in Australia, you always seem to have turkey. It is like the inevitable poulet in Continental hotels. There must be enormous quantities of wild turkeys there; at any rate, they are always succulent. We also always had very good and elaborate trifles, and very weak tea, and, on this occasion, strawberries and cream and pineapple. After lunch there was a long interval, while we sat on a fence, and watched another ruminative cow eating sugar cane. We were waiting for the “loco.” We were not very clear what it was, and when it arrived, it turned out to be a little engine drawing some trucks, across which rough planks had been thrown for seats, like those at Big Brook; but whereas the engine on that occasion was stoked with logs, and gave out a fragrant aromatic smoke, this dilatory “loco” burnt some kind of soft coal, and had a very short chimney, so that we were deluged with large and solid smuts, in comparison with which the molasses were the merest trifle. However, the country through which it took us was so beautiful and enchanting that nothing else mattered. It was our first experience of tropical bush. Elsewhere there had been little undergrowth, the tall gums soared upwards unimpeded. Here the vast white eucalyptus trees were festooned with thickly interlacing creepers hanging in great ropes. High up on the trees grew masses of staghorn ferns and orchids. Far out of reach the graceful, delicate “rock lily” hung its pendulum of pale chablis-coloured bells, and still more exquisite were the fragile white blooms of another orchid. In places were stretches of sugar plantation, and banana fields, always with their background of hill and forest. The fresh greenness of everything was delightful, for the district is well watered.

The line, which was sometimes laid across rough logs thrown over a small gorge, with a stream running through it, ended abruptly in the Maroochy River, swift-flowing between low banks, with the tall trees of the forest on one side, and a sugar plantation waving feathery heads of bloom on the other. We walked back with two friends. It was much more silent than an English forest. There was no pattering of the small feet of birds on the dry, dead carpet of leaves, and no continual twitter. A profusion of ferns grew along the track, and a quantity of large scarlet raspberries. The gum trees were putting out their red spring shoots. Sometimes the clear, sharp call of the peewit sounded, or the infectious peal on peal of mocking giggles from the kookooburra, sometimes the frogs were crying all together, as they cried in Aristophanes’ time, “Breckkek kek kek—koax koax,” and now for the first time we heard the Australian bull frog that clucks like a hen. Here and there was a clearing with a homestead with high verandahs. They made one long to spend a month in that lovely place, and feel day by day the great peace of the forest, with only the frogs and the trickle of a stream over its smooth, brown rocks to break the stillness.

We passed occasionally a little camp with a rough cooking place, but there was never anyone in them. As we emerged from that charmed country into the more prosaic, cultivated land, where pineapples were growing, and bananas with their great purple bells, we saw a beautiful brown bird with a long tail, silent and stately as the bush itself. It looked down on us from the high fork of a gum tree, but did not condescend to fly away. Hospitable Nambour had prepared tea for us on our return; not what we mean by tea at home, but the Australian tea, a meal calculated to stand a traveller in good stead till breakfast next morning. Of all our sunny Australian days that walk in the bush was one of the most charming episodes.