BEAUTIFUL AUSTRALIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2649, 21 December 1904, Page 82

BEAUTIFUL AUSTRALIA.

(Sydney Bulletin.)

Only when you have travelled Maoriland and grown weary of the gigantic scenery ao you learn fully to appreciate the lovely views of Australia. Maoriland is decked in vivid green, in fiery red, in snowy white that caps blackness, or in the tawny hues of tussocked herbage. There is nothing soft, no resriul tint, nothing to swell your heart with the thouglit, "I love this."* A man may have a wife who* is boldly beautiful, who dresses in flaunting costiuns, whose cheeks flame with animal blood, who holds her head proudly aloft — a woman whom every eye follows_with admiration ; yet that woman will not have a real kiss m her nature, nor a fond caress, nor a sympathetic thought. Such a woman i* Maoriland; the bold beauty Nof her selfsatisfied profile becomes less lovely every time you look at it. And Maoriland's girlish emblem is grown in Dunedin — the breezy, rata-cheeked maiden who astonishes an Australian with Eer free walk and blazing colour.

You may travel all Australia and never gee anything like this 5 from maidenhood to mountain peak there is an air of suavity, of refinement, of artistic combination. Australia kn.qwa hcnv; to jiut on her garb g.&

»reen, and she wears it well ; but shd uses no blaze of red to make the green garisl- Her trimmings are the lovely yellow of mimosa, or the pink of the daisy, or the cream of the gum-blossom ; and these delicate hues are always lending a charm to soften and refine. Even the clay and the quartz and the soil and the rocks have tints that are beautiful. Australian trees carry their colour in the trunks, not in the foliage. You will find: rarely beautiful hues in the blossoms, but the gum boles have the most wonderfully lovely tints and tracery. Even the rocks of the coast are sometimes rainbow-hued, and on the Blue Mountains you will often see the precipices of the summits looking like crowns of gold in the sunset. This is what you love; there is nothing haggard like the volcanic piles of Otira, nothing appalling like Kotorua, nothing tohurt like Waimangu ; just a caressing softness of scenery that you forsake at times to intoxicate yourself with more rugged and exciting charms ; but that all the time is calling you back like a wife who becomes more beautiful because her loveliness is of true womanhood. As I write, I can call to mind Australian views whose every feature is stamped yin memory, yet that I have seen time and again without any special idea of admiration. - They charm me here in Maoriland because I see them by the light of contrast. In "Australia the perspective is dun and grey ; " in Maoriland it is only the perspective that is lovely. Australian scenery does not compose into pictures as leadily as Maoriland's. There needs no ge-nius to give 1 true presentment of Maoriland views, but the artist is yet to come who will reach the hearts of the Australian people, and make them say, "How true .'"how lovely! I did not think the bush was so beautiful !" You see, it is true of people that you must show them, what is fine before they can see it. In a vague way they are conscious of loveliness, but they do not explain it to themselves. Some day ar artist will come forward with insight of Australian beauty and intuition of Australian light, and paiuu so that people will feel their hearts swell. But not yet. The time will come when the people are worked to a high pitch of united feeling, when they need a voice and a sign ; and the voice will be a natural song and the sign a picture. . Yet the reality is always with us, and we need no picture of what we can see. In Victoria, the" view seemed to me always one of peace and prosperous contentment, especially when the green is splashed with the yellow daisy, aud the cows are dotted about in every paddock. Adelaide — green and pink, hazed with apple and peach bloom — looks like a fairy city at the time of year when fruit troes bud a dream by a smooth, glassy sea. The grass is luxuriant, and every house lends its patch of vine and flower and fruit tree. .These scenes change into the sere of drought, when the grass dies, and the land is scourged with sun-fire. But I like to remember them with their daisies and sprays and apple bloom, soft and caressing as the playground of Grecian gods. Mount Gambier and Eden are both evergreen — two lovely towns Avhich show Australia in seductive youth : Mount Gambier red with cherries ; Fden with its wattle and grass-grown paths, and murmuring waters fingering the mossj; stones of the river-bed. Prettj iittle 'Eden! with its old, white houses bright in a green setting. Further along the coast, between Ulladulla and Bateman's Bay, there is a glorious stretch of scrub-girt road that; sometimes curves on the crest of the highi hills, sometimes in a siding where you can see the ocean glinting like glass through the tall peppermints and bloadwoods, and again dipping down into some boulderbestrewn aelJ where the springs join into a creek that brushes aside the ferns to get through. Nearer Sydney come the lillipilli-dotted ranges through Robertson on your way to Albion Park, where the vista extends as far as you can see, and is lovely all the way. I remember driving from Hornsby to West Maitland, through Wiseman's Ferry. There are pretty orchard scenes first, then typical rugged bush of the poorest soil, and suddenly I saw the Hawkesbury from a. height, with Wiseman's Ferry directly beneath. The miniature township was resting in its hour of greeny dusk, and' the river was catching its last gleams, and children's voices - were loud in play among the graves of the old churchyard, and a few women were nursing their infants and doing needlework on a tomb. It was one of the prettiest pictures I have ever seen — an Australian setting to an old-world view. I travelled up the fertile Maodanald Valley, with its prodigious growth of fruits going to waste ; but Wiseman's Ferry alone remains mentally vivid. Nearly all Australian scenery has the distinctive feature of looking useful. You realise that the gum tree is not only pretty, but it is a good property ; that the rounded hills are not only exquisite in their curves and tints, but they fatten stock ; that the iridescent cascade is not only soothing to the eyes and senses, but is giving life and vigour all the way to the sea, and is far more precious than pearls. Maoriland scenery represents nothing but superabundant water. Its forests are luxuriant tangles of herbage without fruit or flower, and give shelter to nothing but a few wekas and kiwis and an occasional tui. Australian Bush. is a mother to millions and millions of animals. Maoriland is a land of cloud, and the light at its best has not the crystal quality which seems to give life to the Australian view ; the sunsets are less finely coloured than in Australia, where the whole wide West is sometimes lit up in brilliant glory. Sitting in the upper gardens at Sydney, looking to the hailrmr Heads, you may see a sight at evening sveh as cannot be matched in any pat of the world. The Botanical Gardens ,110 al your feet, the warships and Gaid< n Is- 1 md and the ships of all nations lie be} ond to Watson's Bay, and all the foliage of the foreshores is dotted with red-tiled vihttv, their windows

flaming with the fire of the setting sun. At your back is the splendid panorama of evening ; to the east the dome is sapphire ■with the peculiar light that is seen at sunset right across Australia from Sydney to Perth, but becomes fainter the further north or south you go, until in Melbourne ©r in Rockhampton you may not see it at

And, finally, in Australia the scenery is varied. You find rugged grandeur and tropical luxuriance at Cairns, splendid gorge scenery in West Tasmania, a panorama of sea coast from the heights above Byron Bay in USew South Wales, snow views on the Monaro, at Clermont a sea of plain whose billows are blue grass, and lovely scrub where the northern bauhinia is in bloom For colour go to Westralla, - "where the whole face of the country is ablaze like a brilliant carpet, where the wild-flower trains are ran from Perth, and you are sec down to gather the most beautiful flowers in all the wflrld. Every flower you pluck is more lovely than the last/ Even- in the small towns see the rarest wild blossoms blushing at the doorsteps of the houses as if they were a planted garden. No ; Australia is not a land of black and white, of vivid green and -flaming red ; but when we wish to see thesercplours at thsir best, then we may take' a^trip to Maoriiand. — R. 8., Maoriland. - "