320 By Stream and Sea. 



instead of their leaves, and which are never, therefore, with- 

 out some sort of foliage. At one turn these woods appear 

 covering the slopes of mountainous country, not with the 

 April greens or October colourings of home, but with a 

 prevailing greyness which soon becomes familiar, and in 

 time uninteresting. The clearings, however, will most 

 attract the immigrant's attention, for it is from them that 

 they receive their first inkling of Australian life. After 

 three months of sea and sky it will be pleasant to look out 

 upon green pastures, and see once more cattle and horses 

 grazing in close proximity to the dwelling-houses of man. 

 The newly-arrived immigrants wonder why in the meadows, 

 as they have been used to call them, there are so many 

 stumps of trees, cut off a yard or so from the ground ; but 

 they soon learn that this is how new homes are made, and 

 that the prostrate logs and charred trunks from which arises 

 thin blue smoke, mark the determination of some settler to 

 cut down and burn until he has cleared himself a space in 

 the Bush for pasture and homestead. The immigrant begins 

 even thus early to perceive that in the sweat of his brow lies 

 his chance in the future. He perceives that rough and strong- 

 posts and rails replace the sweet-scented hedgerows of the 

 shires ; that here there are immensity of space and freedom 

 to roam at will ; that though a settler may live in a tiny 

 slab-hut, with roof of bark or shingle, he looks as happy as 

 a king, with his children playing about, and with the con- 

 sciousness that though his estate be uncultivate and wild, 

 it is his own to make or mar. 



Nearer town the scene becomes less primitive. Groups 

 of bananas, patches of maize, lucerne, sugar, and clumps 

 of feathery bamboo around the larger dwellings of well-to-do 

 colonists, are visible amongst numerous other evidences of 

 industrial pursuits. Then come the suburbs of Brisbane 



