PRESIDENT S ADUKESS. 17 



the climate wiw freakish, the euii.steUations were unfamiliar. He not only set 

 about cataloguing the freaks — "But this is New Holland . . . where the 

 swans are black and the eagles are white; where the kangaroo, an animal be- 

 tween the squirrel and the deer, has five claws on its fore-paws, and three talons 

 on its hind-legs, like a bird, and yet hops on its tail; where the mole (Ornithor- 

 hynchus paradoxus) lays egg-s, and has a duck's bill," &c., &e.* But he also pro- 

 ceeded to account for them on the supposition that other countries were created 

 in the beginning, whereas the fifth Continent was an after-bii'th. not conceived 

 in the beginning, but which emerged at the first sinning, and was, tiieref ore, curst ; 

 and the freaks were the fruit of it. 



At a later date (1884), another spokesman, Marcus Clark, expressed his 

 views about Australia thus — "Europe is the home of knightly song, of bright 

 deeds and clear morning thought. ... In Australia alone is to be found 

 the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. 

 Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowere without perfume, our 

 birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all 

 fours."! These and similar effusions are not to be regarded simply as nonsense. 

 On the contrary, they are most instructive and precious landmarks in the progress 

 of a knowledge of Australia in Australia, in the daysi when Science was too un- 

 developed to offer the real interjiretation. The spokesmen were educated men, 

 but men of a too literary education, for whom science-teaching was not available 

 in their youth ; but what they said was untainted with the idea that gives birth 

 to what is apt to be regarded as the only thing worth while, "That's the way to 

 make money." 



In Barron Field's time, even scientific men thought that species were created 

 as such. If the animals and jilants of Austi'alia were freaks, then that was what 

 they were intended to be. Marcus Clark might have read Darwin's ''Origin of 

 Species," but, if so, it failed to impress him. But to-day, scientific men can 

 explain the supposed f reakishness . Some of it was due to the fact that Aus- 

 tralia was a sort of "Noah's Ark" for "living fossils" ; some of it had no particular 

 significance, but much of it was the outward and visible sign of successful adapta- 

 tion to periodically arid conditions, whereby the supposed freaks were enaljled 

 to survive droughts, and to live in harmony with a variable and. at times, exact- 

 ing environment. Mwtntis iiititdnditi, just what the man who goes on tlie laud 

 needs to know. 



At a still later period, only sixteen years ago, another spokesman, another 

 kind of spokesman, expressed his views about life on the land in Australia. These 

 deserve caustic criticism, not merely because what the writer has to say is non- 

 sense, l)ut because it is pernicious nonsense. I refer to a leading article, en- 

 titled "Australian Pessimism," in the Evening News for April 4th, 1903. After 

 remarking- upon the absence of poems of a fresh, joyous nature written by an 

 Australian; of successful attempts to write on the two topics which engross 

 writers of most other nations — viz., lo\e and home-life, the writer proceeds to 

 say — "The secret is to be found in the conditions of existence here : life in the 

 Australian bush is one long weai-y gamble with malignant fate; no man feels sure 

 of his return for his labour and money; that incomprehensible deity known as 

 'luck' i-ules everything. The greatest care may be wasted, the greatest preeau- 



' Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales. Edited by Barron Field (1825), 

 pp. mi, 494. 



tPrefaoe to "Poems of the late Adam Lindsay Gordon" (1884). 



