Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/105

Rh mankind, and if by some accident of social progress its towns and villages were swept away, then in a few years Western Australia would slip back through time till it became again a strip of the earth as the earth was when first the mammals began to appear on its surface. Western Australia is as old as that; and he who looks on it now with any spark of imagination cannot but be thrilled at the vision afforded him of the planet as it was millions of years ago. No tropical country, perhaps no country at all which men inhabit, except Patagonia, conveys this impression of the unaltered primeval world. But one could hardly expect a locomotive, a thing of steel and steam, to dwell on this aspect of the land of its adoption. Rather would it say that in Western Australia you could see at its earliest and best, man the pioneer, making for himself a clearing, a home, a community in the wild, blazing out the trails, watering the desert, laying a toll upon the elements. Here he had built a town growing like a city of enchantment in the bush; here he had found gold in the wilderness; and here—you could see him at the beginning—he was carving wheat-lands and orchards from the forest. Now, lastly, he was going to bring his fields and forests and the harvest of his untapped sea-board by rail to the markets of the East.