Australian Landscape
ON this high ground grow tallow wood and the saw- leaved eallicoma. Here spotted gums and turpen- tines rise—tower tall—where once the great leviathan took his pleasure. On these rocky spurs, these razor- backed hills, are pot-holes, wave-worn, the stones that fashioned them still in them. On these summits, even yet, the earth has the sea-sand's salt in it—fossils, finny treasures. But the light on this risen world has forgotten the ocean. It is clearer than water. It is a white light, lee-edged.
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k Above these undulating ranges the sky has its spectrum of flight, its winged traffic and bird cycles. In the upper air go companies of cranes and curlews, cry-by-nights, far-sighted voyagers that pass, unresting, from one horizon to the other. In flocks above the tree-tops arc the parrots, cockatooS and their kindred ; in the higher branches, dollar birds, dusky wood-swallows ; sweet- throated. singers in the lower boughs, and, in their degree, birds of the scrub, ground birds, waterbirds.
By the trickle of water in the creek where the duck- billed platypus is, white sally grows, and two-veined hickory, and false sarsaparilla—la belle dame sans merci- and those pied violets white and blue, which are not shy but daring, Mae Peeping Toms spying on beauty ; and honey-dew with a fly .in its maw. And sometimes, coming .94 of the distance, going back into the distance again, there is a sound like clapping or an axe chopping Wood, and sometimes hares dance across the scene, or spotted wild cats play there. And all along the range's length, breadth, depth, and in the foot-holds of the hills, 9e1,1 log, leaf, twig, each hole and stony crevice, each P001 and grassy square and water-brook, shelters some creature—instinctively remembering it, committing it to memory, experiencing it. And in all these mountain heights there is but one sign of man, a clearing—railings ; a weather-board cottage ; the first he ever put there. Who is this who comes creeping and prying through the brushwood, running to the red gum that stands alone in the clearing, nervously re-touching the satin-smooth surface of its bark ? Who is this so friendly with the trees, so well aware of the red gum's secrets, its elemental need, its tasselled flowers and seed pods, all its rude make- shifts and contrivances for procreation, and the bees that visit it ? Fugitive, he hides behind the tree, looks to the right and left of it, and then runs swiftly across the paddock to finger the palings of the fence ; fumbles with the gate in the palings, and presently entering, stares in wonder at the bricks in the pathway, ponders the usage of the mint and paisley growing in its border, and then kneels in amazement to feel the planed surfaces of the planks on the veranda, profoundly considering them, calculating, guessing what sands, what tides, what winds, what ages and generations of time have so smoothed them, wondering how they have come here. Thinking the place is holy, he peeps through the sitting-room window, taps in bewilderment on the slats and frames and hinges of the shutters, looks with awe at the red woollen balls on the tablecloth. Quietly, the aboriginal slips along the side of the house, crosses the gully and is gone, over the timbered belts of the hilltops, and beyond the the moony wastes of space, to dwell apart. ETHEL ANDERSON.
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