Page:Advanced Australia.djvu/104



ROM Sydney to Brisbane is a short run of a little over 700 miles. The mail train leaves Sydney at 6.15, and in the course of the evening reaches Newcastle, the great coal centre of the Southern Hemisphere, whence, by-the-by, a cargo of coals (for smelting purposes) was actually sent to Newcastle, England, in 1883: a case of γλαῦκ' ἐὶς Ἀθήνας which has not affected the proverb. We crossed the border at about noon next day, and for several hours steamed steadily through one of the finest stretches of agricultural land in the world—the Darling Downs—arriving at Brisbane, after mounting the hills of the Main Range, east of Toowoomba, at 10.45,. The Darling Downs are only as yet known to the outside world as the home of the squatter. Discovered in 1827, by Allan Cunningham, the explorer and botanist, who penetrated inland from the poorer granite country of the coast to the head waters of the Condamine, it was settled by the early pastoralists in 1840 and the succeeding years. They took possession, under a liberal tenure, of the entire Downs country from Warwick to Toowoomba; an expanse, measuring about 70 miles by 30, of beautifully undulating and well-watered plain, surrounded by mountainous country, the detrition from which has filled it with a strong black alluvial deposit, compared by Americans who have seen it to the characteristic black soil of their own prairies. The district as a whole comprises about 88