It is perhaps not a compliment to our geographic sense
that the superabundant wealth of Western Australia has not touched the imagination of our people more nearly. Up in the north are great empty harbours, where a fleet could hide and be scarcely noticed. There are hills and cliffs of rich ironstone alongside still waters of the depth of the biggest ship. There are wide pastoral areas that, in Lord Dufferin's phrase, "confound the arithmetic of the explorer." Last and certainly not least, there is that glorious south-west corner where Mr. and Mrs. Pickles grow fruit and ring-bark trees. It has rivers and inlets, full of fish, and a very good rain- fall. The forests are of a fantastic magnificence. How vividly I remember going into a Karri forest and seeing through the clean trunks a team of twenty-four oxen waiting to drag off bits of a great tree that was about to fall. The athletic Australians—if the adjective is not supererogatory—teed up on platforms cutting across the trunk with the longest cross-cut I ever saw. We all guessed—and were all below the mark—how high it was up to the first twig that broke the smooth pillar. When she crashed the measures proved it to be 135 feet with perhaps sixty more of leafy and inter- rupted trunk and boughs. There is no more glorious bit of homelike land in all the world than the piece between the snug harbour of Albany and Perth. Among minor glories it is a paradise of wild flowers, and alongside it the wheat area expands steadily. This half-continent of Western Australia contains less than half the population of Glasgow. What ampleelbow room will those two score of English tots discover when they reach Fairbridge, a place so situated that it is in touch with the flowery south yet north enough to feel the wonder of the vast pastoral plains. The elbow room would not be perceptibly contracted if 2,000,000 were estab- lished there.
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