DESERT CONQUEST

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 30, 28 April 1927, Page 8

DESERT CONQUEST

ROMANCE OF RAILWAYS SYDNEY TO BROKEN HILL (From Our Special Representative.) SYDNEY, April 7. If you look at the map of New South AYales you will see the line of a railway marked due west from Orange, through Molong, Parkes and Condobolin, and on yet to Trida and Ivanhoe. From there a dotted line leads across the Western Plains to the Darling River, and beyond that again to Broken Hill, which Is in this State. This line ,is nearly built now, only the bridge over the Darling is unfinished from Ivanhoe westward.

Next month the Broken Hill Limited will pull out of Central Station on its 600-mile flight to the w-est. This will be the beginning of the conquest of the dry distances, and the war upon them will only end when the railhead of a line from Central Station ends at Darwin. And to run the trains on these tracks locomotives of special quality will be needed. When the camel was introduced into Australia a great advance was made in outback travel in such parts. But the camel has not the speed that present day demands insist on. The obvious thing, then, was to make a machine with a camel’s thirst-resist-ing powers and a locomotive’s speed. And this has been done. The C 36 type of engine can run to Ivanhoe’ in one flight, without recoaling. It is an achievement of world interest. Though oil-burning locomotives run longer trips in other lands it is doubtful if there is a coal-burning engine anywhere else which makes these long trips. Whether there is or not, the

fact remains that Australian engineers have designed and Australian mechanics have built such an engine, and its importance in land travel in the Commonwealth is very great. The camel is eclipsed and the distances will be conquered. For the first time since what is known as the “desert line’* beyond Condobolin was opened, the commissioners recently visited the terminus of it. The rails were pushed out beyond Trida to Ivanhoe, away out into the cattle country, where drought sometimes is king for years—a country of romance which the earlier Australian poets sang. There ■was one poem by C. H. Souter considered still to be the finest lyric ever written that is called “Irish Lords,” the refrain from which ran, “On the Road to Ivanhoe.” Some of the lines were these: The clover burr was two feet high, and the billabongs were full , The brolgas danced a minuet, and the world seemed made of wool. The nights were never wearisome and the days icere never slow , When first roe came to Irish Lords, on the road to Ivanhoe. The rime was on the barley-grpss, as ice gassed the homestead rails, A Darling jackass piped us in, with his trills and turns and scales, And youth and health and carelessness sat on the saddle-bow And Mary lived at Irish Lords , on the road to Ivanhoe. On every hand teas loveliness and the Fates were fair and kind. We drank the very wine of life and we never looked behind; And Mary, Mary everyxchere went fluting to and fro, When first we came to Irish Lords, on the road to Ivanhoe. * * * The window) of her dainty ■ bower, where the golden banksia grew Stared like a dead man's glazing eye, and the roof had fallen through. No violets in her garden bed, and her voice! —hushed long (Jso. When last toe camped at Irish Lords, on the road to Ivanhoe. Did the writer of those lines and the men of whom he wrote ever dream that a 160-ton locomotive would thunder across country, clear from Sydney to Ivanhoe, -with a train for Broken Hill. In the wildest flights of imagination they might have. And Mary, the belle of Ivanhoe, would have had a puzzled look in her pretty eyes had. she seen, instead of the pacing horses with jingling bridles and thudding hoofs, a graceful monster of steel racing along the shining tracks. The romance of old may be dead on the road to Ivanhoe, but the new romance is just as thrilling, and instead of the distances numbing the imagination till the mind settled down to contemplation of only what the eye could see, in the near future, throughout Australia the romance ! of power and speed will stir the pulses again, though in a different way. The cyclopean eye of the desert engines, staring into the Nvest, is visualising something which we of the cities can scarcely grasp—the day when Australia will indeed be Australia, and not merely a collection of settlements along the shores of a continent. Americans became a nation when the locomotives spanned the continent. And Australia when that happens will be a nation, too. ~ . WILL LAWSON.