The Beauty of Australia [antikvár]

Waterways of the Great South Land For well over a century travel writers have observed the convention of describing Australia, the Great South Land of ancient geographers, as a continent of infinite scenic subtlety which can be appreciated only by those patient enough and curious enough to endure climatic hardships and make long, monotonous journeys for the thrill of discovering oases. Australia, they claim, is a sombre land in which the shapes of nature are unfamiliar, the colours of verdancy muted, and the vistas depressingly vast. It is a land in which time is dimensionally different and silence and loneliness all-pervading. No one who really knows Australia can accept this convention as logically founded. It grossly misrepresents both by overstatement and inaccurate generalisation. Australia has many faces, many moods, many chmates. In the far north it is sub-equatorial, in the extreme south sub-antarctic. It has blazing deserts, but it also has rain-drenched jungles, snow-capped mountains, woodlands, moors, prairies and marshes. It has peaks which pierce the sky like needles, mesas, razorbacks, saw-tooth ranges . . . rivers which meander placidly, rivers which race and roar in a series of cataracts all the way from their sources to the sea. And rivers which hide themselves underground for hundreds of miles, appearing only as still, limpid pools between sandbars. It is surely absurd to assert that such a geographical cocktail never reveals the beauty of the earth obviously or intimately—that its many flavours are eternally blunted by a kind of romantic, antipodean tristesse de distance. There are many parts of Australia which, even to the most unacclimated European eyes, are just as clearly beautiful as parts of Switzerland, Scandinavia, Great Britain or Greece—or of North America, Africa or Asia. The colors of the landscape are no more and no less subtle. The quality of the light is no less determined by season and latitude, and the forms of nature are no less familiar than the forms of nature in any other part of the world. True, the Australian scene—or perhaps one should say the Australian scenic pageant—contains much that is unique. But in striving over-hard to isolate and represent this uniqueness writers, and for that matter painters and photographers, have often lost sense of perspective and have detracted from rather than added to an understanding of the country they have attempted to portray. The collection of camera studies in this book represents a rebellion from the convention of portraying Australia as a sad, brooding, perverse country for which one must first acquire a taste before coming to appreciate its quality. It is a collection which records the joyous rediscovery of familiar beauties—green grass, blue hills, bright flowers, calm waters, tall trees and sunshine which caresses rather than sears. Australia is no less bountifully endowed with all these things than the rest of the pleasantly habitable earth. It is a fact of geography that Australia is the driest of the continents; but it is also a fact of geography that areas of the country larger than many European and Asian states never experience crippling drought. There are thousands of miles of rivers which never cease to flow and scores of lakes —both natural and man-made—serving populated districts where an abundance of water rather than a dearth of it determines the pattern of living. Scores of clear, fast-flowing streams have their sources on the eastern watershed of the Great Dividing Range, a chain of mountains which extends for more than 2,000 miles down the eastern seaboard where the mean annual rainfall is higher than in England's home counties and most of Western Europe. When British colonists first established settlements on the central coast of New South Wales towards the end of the 18th century and set out to explore the hinterland they at first followed the river valleys and were deeply impressed by the fertility and beauty of the coastal plains. Governor Phillip, founder of Sydney, described the lower reaches of the Hawkesbury River where it enters the Pacific at Broken Bay as "the finest Buchan Point, North Queensland View north to Ellis Beach and Port Douglas.