Beauty Or The Australian Bush

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 153, 24 March 1939, Page 5 (Supplement)

Beauty Or The Australian Bush

PERHAPS the most lasting impression carried away by any visitor to Australia is of the beauty of the Australian bush —but it takes a born Australian to appreciate fully the wonder and variety and charm the bush possesses. Straight trunks of eucalyptus like cathedral pillars, scent of bluegum and wattle, wild flowers of bottlerush, waratah, boronia, laughter of kookaburras, gorgeous lories flashing across a sunshiny glade—memory makes a bushman sick with longing when, half the world away, he recalls the forests of Australia.

IT varies endlessly, from the coconut jungle of the reef islands to the hardwood forests of Tasmania. It shares only two things in common throughout the continent—its sunny, pollen-laden, sweet-scented atmosphere, and its tall, pendulous-leaved tucalypts. The blue-gum is Australia’s national tree, just as the scent of'gumnuts is her national aroma, and the strength and beauty and hardiness of the gum-tree is typical of her young manhood.

Much is said and written about Australia’s deadly snakes —but one can spend a lifetime in Australia and never set eyes on a snake. Many Australians, even from country places, have not seen a snake in their whole lives. Snakes there are, in the lonely mountain valleys, in the deserts of the hinterland, in the tropical north—yes, and even occasional specimens within a walk of Sydney’s shopping centre. But they are timid creatures, for the most part, and slip away at the first sound of a twig cracking underfoot.

Tourists can set aside the thought of snake-bite as something rare and fantastic. More real is the danger, to the new chum, of getting lost in the forest. The bushman knows by the blue-gum bark, and the flowering shrubs, and the aspect of bush and sky, just where the sun rises and where it sets. But to the stranger the bush is trackless and without signpost or milestone. Beyond imagination is the charm of a real bush homestead—little weatherboard shack dwarfed by the immensity of the ancient trees, shadowed by the trembling leaves. There is nothing sweeter than -to dine on the broad verandah on the frugal country fare of merino chops and “damper” bread and billy tea, to watch the stars come out above the silhouetted treetops, to hear the night-owl calling as one goes to bed, and be sent to sleep by the lullaby of the whispering branches, and awakened by the music of magpie and bellbird.