Chapter III: Somerset

No one was sorry when, about sixteen days after leaving Singapore, the coast of Australia hove in sight. We passed through Torres Straits, which were adorned with the remains of three recent wrecks, and anchored off Somerset, the northernmost township in Australia. It is merely a pearl-fishing station, and will never develop into anything, as there is no back country to it. The pearl-fishers who live there are a rough-looking lot, not encumbered with any superfluous clothing, and generally without shoes or stockings. Their trade, which is an exceedingly profitable one, is carried on by means of black divers, who go down and bring up the mother-of-pearl shells. These shells, which are about a foot or sixteen inches across, and shaped like an oyster-shell, were worth at that time nearly £250 per ton. The pearls found in the shell were reckoned to pay all expenses, and the profits were enormous. Even at the present time, when pearl-shell has fallen in value to £140 a ton, it pays well to get. There is another pearl-fishery on the western coast of Australia, and some of the pearls obtained there fetch large prices. Though they are never equal to the Oriental pearls in colour, they make up for it in size, and I heard of one being sold in London recently for £1500. The West Australian pearl-fisheries are liable to the most terrific hurricanes. The signs which herald their approach are perfectly well known, and give ample time to a vessel to secure a good offing. But the pearl-fishers are generally much too recklessly intent on their occupation to take any such precaution, and every now and then the whole lot of them get swept right away, some of their boats being sent to the bottom, and others blown clean out of the water into the mangroves that fringe the shore. The few that are not drowned in one of these visitations do not seem to care or take any warning. _Mox reficit rates_, the pearl-fisher picks up the pieces, sends off for another schooner if his own is hopelessly damaged, and goes on again as if such a thing as a hurricane was unknown.

One or two white men, who have nothing to do with the pearl-fishing, have taken up their permanent abode at Somerset for no reason at all that I could see, except to enjoy the society of black women and to run an imminent risk of being knocked on the head by black men. The blacks in the neighbourhood of Somerset are very bad. They are a fierce warlike race of athletic savages, with a cross of the Malay in them. The Government Resident at Somerset wages an endless war with them, and from the intrepid bravery which he has always displayed in his encounters with them he has established a wonderful prestige. So recklessly daring, and so successful have some of his raids against them been, that he is firmly believed to be the Devil by all the natives in the Somerset district. A mob of about 200 of them once came and camped on an island opposite to his residence. He knew that they would very shortly attack him, so he determined not to wait for them. As soon as it was dark, he stripped himself naked, and tying his rifle and his ammunition on to his head to keep them dry, he swam across to the island. The tide ran very strong, and the channel was a quarter of a mile wide, but he got across all right.

Without the slightest fear he attacked the whole camp of blacks single handed, and routed them utterly. So terrified were they at the fact of one white man daring to attack them alone, that they came to the conclusion that there must be something superhuman about him, and cleared out with all speed. It was months before he was troubled with them again. He has been there now for a good many years, and numerous are the hairbreadth escapes that he has had during that time. So far his courage has carried him safely through, and though he has often been wounded, he has never come to serious harm. But his enemies are numerous and implacable, and it is odd if a spear or a tomahawk does not finish him at last.

From Torres Straits right away to below Cape Capricorn, runs the great barrier reef of Australia. Inside this the navigation is very intricate; a perfect network of islands and reefs. We took a pilot on board at Somerset, but even then we had occasionally to anchor at night when there was no room. The scenery all down the coast of Queensland is very wild, and in some parts extremely beautiful. Endless masses of wooded mountain-ranges run all along the mainland, and some of the islands with their emerald slopes dotted over with patches of dark green firs are very picturesque.

Whit-sunday passage, just before coming to Bowen, is one of the prettiest bits of scenery on the whole coast of Australia. The ranges on the mainland here are very broken, and just off the shore is a large group of lovely islands, between which and the mainland the coasting-steamers’ track passes. It looked very beautiful in the evening, when the mountains were turning to that soft clear smoky blue, peculiar to Australian scenery, and the crimson fire of sunset was still smouldering in the golden west.

The _Somerset_ did not call off Mackay, which was my destination, so I had to go on to Keppel Bay, the port for Rockhampton, 200 miles farther south, and wait for a boat back to Mackay.

I left the _Somerset_ with feelings of unmixed joy, and with a hearty hope that she might go to the bottom when she got into Sydney harbour, and stay there. Since that time, to the great delight of everyone who ever travelled in any of their boats, the Eastern and Australian Company have abandoned the Queensland mail service, after losing nearly all their boats. The _Brisbane_, the best boat they had, was wrecked near Torres Straits. The _Normanby_ shared her fate soon after. The _Singapore_ ran ashore near Mackay and was totally lost, and the _Queensland_ was run into by the _Barrabool_, and sunk just off Sydney. They were altogether a most unfortunate company, and were very badly treated by the New South Wales Government, who induced them to start by the promise of a large subsidy, which promise was repudiated as soon as the company’s ships began running. Their place has been taken by the British India Company, who run a service of very fine boats from London to Brisbane _viâ_ Batavia, carrying the mails, and calling at Thursday Island, Cooktown, Townsville, Bowen, Mackay, and Keppel Bay on the Queensland coast. They do not run farther south than Brisbane, and have no subsidy from any Government except that of Queensland.

My brother met me in Rockhampton, and we were fortunate enough to find a boat sailing for Mackay a few hours after I landed. We ran up to the entrance of the Pioneer River, on which Mackay is situated, in about twenty-four hours, and had to anchor there and wait for the tide to get in. We amused ourselves by fishing for sharks, and caught one about six feet long. About one o’clock in the morning the tide served, and we steamed up the Pioneer for a couple of miles, and lay alongside of a rather dilapidated wharf. No one appeared to take sufficient interest in the arrival of the steamer to be on the wharf, and, beyond a few sheds, I could not, at first, see any signs of a town at all. My brother knew the way, however, and, collaring as much of my luggage as we could carry, we set off to the hotel. Following his lead, I floundered through a mass of black mud and several deep puddles of water, and emerged on to a road about three inches deep in dust. After going along this for a hundred yards, some buildings began to loom up against the starlit sky, and a little farther on we turned a corner, and found ourselves in the main street of Mackay.

It might have been the city of the dead for any signs of a population. Not a light was to be seen in the rows of uneven, low, wooden buildings that ran along each side of the street, and the only living creatures were several dogs fast asleep in the middle of the road. Turning another corner, we stumbled over the body of a man with his heels on the pavement and his head in the gutter. His hat was off, and he was evidently in the total-collapse stage of drunkenness. My brother struck a match and examined his features.

“Ah, I thought so,” he observed; “it’s the doctor. He’s been like that, off and on, for a fortnight. Here, lend a hand, and pull him out of the gutter. He’ll have a fit if he lies like that much longer.”

Having dragged him into a less apoplectic position, we turned into the hotel. There was no one up, but it was open; so we went upstairs and hunted about for a couple of empty rooms. After one or two bad shots, which disclosed the prostrate forms of several sleepers, most of whom had gone to bed in their boots, we found what we wanted, and turned in. It was pretty hot, and the musquitoes made it rather lively, but we got a few hours’ sleep, and next morning turned out early to get ready for a start up to the station. The first thing we heard from my brother’s black boy, who was waiting about the town for him, was that the horses had got out of the paddock. They were certain to go straight back to the station, so my brother borrowed a horse and sent the boy down the road to look for them. He got them about ten miles away, and did not reappear till the middle of the day.

Meanwhile, I amused myself by examining the town of Mackay. Of all horrible places to live in, the worst is a small coast town in Queensland. They are all alike. The streets are very broad, and almost all the houses built entirely of wood, with verandahs in front of them, extending over the pavement. There is not a green thing to be seen anywhere. Dust is everywhere, inches deep in the streets that are not macadamised, and trees, bushes, houses, and everything are powdered over with it. In summer it is sweltering hot, the glare is frightful, and before I had been half an hour in Mackay, I began to understand why my brother was in such a hurry to get out of it. When I first landed there, the white population of the whole district was under 2000, and that of the actual township under 1000, but I counted seventeen public-houses in the place. The first thing that struck me was that not a single man in the town had a coat or waistcoat on, and the next thing that struck me was what very sensible people they all were, for it was about the middle of March, and the weather was so hot that any superfluous clothing was unbearable.

There was a _table d’hôte_ at the hotel at which we camped, and at dinner-time a crowd of men assembled for the feed. Squatters down from the country, bank-clerks, planters, and business men, not one of them had a coat on. Their invariable costume was a pair of moleskins or tweed trousers, fastened round the waist with a leather belt, a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a silk handkerchief loosely tied round the neck. The Bushmen were easily distinguished by the mahogany brown to which constant exposure to the sun had turned their faces, necks, and arms.

The fashion of wearing no coats is peculiar to Mackay, and has been adopted by the planters, who consider themselves the _elite_ of the place. At a dinner-party on one of the plantations, it is a most curious sight to see all the ladies, _en grande tenue_, dressed in the latest fashion, and the gentlemen sitting down with no coat or waistcoat, and their arms bare to the elbow.

It was one o’clock before we were ready for a start, and, as our station was forty-five miles away, we settled to go out and camp at a station about five-and-twenty miles up the Pioneer River, and go on home next day. The country round Mackay is a dead level alluvial plain for ten or twelve miles, and is all under cultivation for sugar-growing. Our road for the first mile and a half went through a sort of straggling township of small detached houses, each surrounded by a grass paddock; but after this we got among the cane-fields, and the sight of them was very refreshing after being shut up for weeks at sea. There are few prettier plants than sugar, and the panorama of the Mackay cane-fields is really beautiful. For miles the cane stretches away in a level sea of emerald green, here and there a tall brick chimney rising up to indicate the whereabouts of a mill. A broad belt of dark green forest marks the course of the Pioneer, winding through the plains, and beyond this again the cane-fields rise right away to the base of rugged mountains, thickly wooded to the very summit. All along the horizon the mountains of the coast range are piled one behind the other in dark blue masses, their outline rising here and there into sharp peaks against the western sky, and forty miles away towers the mighty form of Mount Dalrymple, over 4000 feet high, the second highest mountain in Queensland. On both banks of the Pioneer, at intervals of a few miles, are the residences of the planters, and certainly the lines have fallen to them in pleasant places. Their houses, as a rule, are extremely comfortable and very well furnished, and the gardens of many of them are paradises of beauty. In good times they make tremendous profits, and their occupation chiefly consists in watching other people work, in the intervals of which they recline in a shady verandah with a pipe and a novel, and drink rum-swizzles. Most of them keep a manager, so that they can always get away for a run down south, or a kangaroo hunt up the country. They are very hospitable, and keep their houses always open to strangers visiting the place, and to their friends in the country who come uninvited, and are welcome to stay as long as they please.

About fourteen miles from Mackay, we passed the last plantation, and got among the gum-trees, and shortly afterwards the track struck the bank of the Pioneer. I have seldom seen a more beautiful river. As a rule, Queensland rivers are muddy, sluggish streams, with low banks covered with mangroves, and many of them would not be called rivers at all in a country where water was more plentiful. But the scenery along the Pioneer is lovely. Its whole length is only about one hundred miles, but it drains a large extent of country, and for the last thirty miles the average width of its bed is from one to two hundred yards. It rises in the coast range, and its course lies through heavily-timbered country all the way to the sea. The banks, sometimes sloping, sometimes very steep, vary in height from fifty to a hundred feet, and are thickly covered with a dense forest of trees and creepers. The river itself is a succession of deep black pools of beautifully clear water, some of them nearly a mile in length, with long rocky rapids between them.

The track wound along the banks for some miles, and every now and then we pulled up to admire some more than usually beautiful reach, where the water was turned to gold in the evening sunlight, and the dim blue mountains showed up through the forest beyond. Swarms of ducks of every description were paddling about in the pools, and sunning themselves on the rocks and sandbanks.

At one bend of the river, just at the head of a deep pool, where the “scrub” on the banks was very thick, my brother said there was pretty sure to be an alligator, and if we went quietly we might get a sight of it; so we got off, hung our horses up to a tree, and crawled through the scrub down the bank to the water’s edge. Peering cautiously through a tangled curtain of creepers that hung over the water, we were rewarded by the sight of a huge alligator, basking on a sandbank about sixty yards off, and apparently fast asleep. The instant we showed ourselves, however, he shuffled into the water with incredible speed. The upper waters of the Pioneer are inhabited by numbers of these brutes, and some of them grow to an enormous size. One was killed not long before I arrived, nineteen feet long, but even this was eclipsed by Big Ben of the Fitzroy, who measured twenty-three feet six inches, and who, when last I saw him, was in the possession of Mr. Jamrach in London. These alligators do not seem to increase much in numbers, and the same ones hang about the same pools for years. From October to March, during the hot weather, they do not show themselves at all, but during the rest of the year, in the cool weather, they lie about on the sandbanks warming themselves all day.

The sun was getting low, so we climbed on to our horses again, and after a three-mile canter along a splendid level track winding through an endless forest of gums, under which the grass grew three feet high, our destination hove in sight.

“Sleepy Hollow,” or, as it is always called, “The Hollow,” the station at which we were going to camp that night, is about the prettiest place on the whole of the Pioneer. As we rode up we were greeted with a chorus of barking from a small army of cattle-dogs that were lying about the outbuildings, and Mr. Charles Rawson, the owner of the Hollow, came out to meet us. He gave a wild shout of delight when he saw who it was. He was an old friend of my brother, and, seizing me by the hand, he bade me welcome to Australia with a heartiness there was no mistaking.

“Hooray, boys!” he said, “this is just about the soundest day I’ve seen for a deuce of a time. If I’d known when your old dug-out was going to fetch the Mackay wharf, you bet I’d have been there to meet you. Here, George, take these horses and turn them into the big paddock.”

“Hold on,” said my brother. “Better put them in the small one, we want to get away early to-morrow.”

“To-morrow! to-morrow be blowed; you’ll stop here for a week any way. You’ll surely never be so beastly mean as to come here for only one night?”

To his great disappointment my brother declared he must be back at the station the next day, as there was a man coming up to pick fat cattle.

“Well, if it’s business,” he observed sadly, “I don’t so much mind; but any way, come on inside now, and have a drop of something short. I was just going to make it sundown when you boys rode up, and I was suffering to look at somebody through the bottom of a glass.”

We followed our host into a cool shady verandah, and he quickly produced the materials for a drink.

“Now, then,” said he, “just let me mix you a swizzle. What’s a swizzle! Oh! I forgot you’d only just landed. Well, I believe a swizzle is about the squarest drink that’s yet been invented, and there’s no one in the district can lay over me at mixing one. But hold on till you try it.”

Never having heard of a swizzle, which is a drink peculiar to Mackay, I believe, I watched his proceedings with interest. First of all he put two inches of Jamaica rum into the bottom of a tumbler, into which he shook a few drops of Angostura bitters from a bottle, with a small hole in the cork. Next he added a small teaspoonful of brown sugar, and a squeeze of a lemon, and filled the tumbler two-thirds full of water. He then took a small stick with three prongs growing the reverse way up at the end, and whirled it round in the tumbler between his hands, with a dexterity only to be acquired by constant practice, till the decoction was foaming to the top of the glass.

Handing it to me quickly, with directions to “drink it while fizzing,” he watched it going down, with one eye shut, and an expression of sympathetic interest on his face.

“How’s that for high?” he asked as I set down the glass with a sigh of satisfaction.

I acknowledged that he had not overrated the beauties of the drink, and asked him where he got the peculiar little stick with which he stirred it up.

“Ah!” he said, “that’s just it. That’s nothing short of a swizzle-stick, and it grows on a tree that’s peculiar to the Mackay district, and no doubt a bountiful Providence placed it there on purpose for the inhabitants to stir up their liquor with. I discovered it myself, and it hadn’t a name, so we christened it the _Swizzlestickia Rawsoniensis_. There’s two of them growing down there in the paddock, alongside the fence.”

The owner of the Hollow is probably one of the most popular men in the north of Queensland. He was one of the earliest settlers in the district, has been identified with its rise and progress, and has not an enemy in the place. There were wild times in the early days of Mackay, and most of his contemporaries have been stretched out for the undertaker, or, if they still live, are mere wrecks of their former selves. But sixteen years of hard work and hard living in the tropics have made never a mark on the iron constitution of our host. His head is marble, and perfectly proof against the influence of Mackay rum, forty-five over proof, as anyone who drinks alongside of him will find to their cost. Many a reveller, waking after a heavy night to repentance and a sick headache, has turned sicker still to see him enter his room at five the next morning, with a cheery smile on his face, a pipe of nigger-head between his lips, and an invitation to come down and bathe in the river. He is nearer fifty than forty now, and his hair is not quite so thick as it was, and getting gray in places. But, to use his own words, “he has still got as bully a set of works as there are in the island, and, bar accidents, is good for another ten years yet.” A kind heart and an inexhaustible fund of good spirits made him as pleasant a mate as a man could wish for, and if there’s any fun going, from an exploring expedition to a game of euchre, he is bound to be up to the neck in it. Having finished our drinks and lit our pipes, we sallied out to scatter a glance round the place.

The forest has been cleared for a little distance round, and the house and garden are surrounded by a paddock of short green turf. The house itself is a large one-storied building, with a fourteen-foot verandah all round covered with masses of every sort of creeper. It stands right on the river-bank, which rises to an elevation of a hundred feet above the bed, and the view up the river is magnificent. Right in front of the house the bed of the river is full of rocky islands and rapids; but above this there is a long stretch of still deep water up to the next bend, three quarters of a mile away. The opposite bank is covered with a most magnificent forest of enormous trees, called in Australia a “scrub,” to distinguish it from open timbered country.

Nothing can be more beautiful in the way of a forest than a Queensland scrub. Fig-trees, Leichardts, white cedar, red cedar, beech, and a hundred other trees whose names I never heard, are crowded together in wild confusion, their dense foliage mingled in masses of every conceivable shade of green. Here and there a group of feathery palms rear their heads above the surrounding forest, and giant creepers hang suspended in thick curtains from one huge tree to another.

In front of the house, just on the fall of the river-bank, is a gigantic bamboo, the father of all bamboos in the Mackay district, and round about the house are several smaller ones. But the garden running along the top of the bank is a sight worth going to Queensland to see. There is fifty feet of black soil here, and it must be a mean sort of plant that would not grow. Lemons, limes, guavas, custard-apples, grapes, mangoes, oranges, and grenadillas, all flourish in a state of perfection that speaks equally well for the care of their owner and the excellence of the climate. Mangoes and oranges seem to do especially well, and the trees of the latter were absolutely weighed down with fruit, and Bananas and passion fruit grow like weeds. In the middle of the garden, on a patch of smooth green turf, stands the most magnificent Poinciana tree I ever saw, about sixty feet high, with huge spreading boughs sweeping right down to the ground. The foliage is light green, and exactly resembles the leaf of a sensitive plant, and in summer it is literally covered with huge spiral flowers of the most brilliant crimson. The roof and side verandah of the house are overrun with masses of Boganvillea creepers, of every shade from pink to purple, and the flower-beds around are full of roses and geraniums. Gardenias grow all about, in bushes five feet high, and flower most beautifully. The back of the garden is sheltered all along by an impenetrable row of bamboos, Leichardts, and fig-trees, and in front, just along the edge of the river-bank, runs a low hedge of hybiscus, blazing with scarlet flowers. The front verandah of the house has been extended into a sort of conservatory, made of a lattice-work of battens split from palm-trees, inside which is a rockery covered with most beautiful ferns.

The mountains and creeks of Northern Queensland are full of every sort of fern, and in the fernery at the Hollow I counted over thirty varieties which Mr. Rawson had picked up in his wanderings about his own runs, and brought home and planted.