QUEENSLAND. 



127 



terror at the intruder, hurries away, or by the clatter of a scrub pigeon or 

 turkey far up in the overarching foliage, or the strange snoring call of the 

 Australian sloth, or native bear. 



In the tropical scrub the lianas, the creeping canes and creepers of every 

 description, bind the trees into compact masses of vegetation ; and it is a 

 vegetation which, if one may be allowed the term, is of a fiercer type than 

 in the south. Every creeper seems to be armed with thorns, to tear the 

 clothes and lacerate the flesh of the rash intruder, and poisonous and stinging 

 plants abound. Chief among these must be placed the nettle-tree, a shrub 

 with broad green, soft-looking leaves, covered with a down that carries 

 torture in every tiny fibre. Even horses brushed by these treacherous leaves 



£Z5S&&*y^ 



Sugar Plantation, Queensland. 



go mad with pain. But in 



the north, as in the south, 



the timber-getter rifles the 



scrub of its treasures of timber, and the sugar planter clears all before him, 



and skims with his cane-crops the incalculable store of fertility accumulated 



in the soil. 



It is in connection with sugar-growing that the labour difficulty, common 

 in Australia, becomes unusually severe in Queensland. The difficulty is two- 

 fold — climatic and economical. Field work in the tropics is everywhere 

 shunned by white men, and in Queensland, north of Mackay, it has not as 

 yet been found possible to induce Europeans to engage in it. Some of the 

 work connected with cane-growing, also, is peculiarly exhausting, because 

 the canes, when they reach a height of six or seven feet, shut out every 

 breeze, and the heat between the rows is stifling. Then a large staff of 



