Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/213



SYDNEY HARBOUR

When we were sailing from Batavia in Java to Colombo there was a New Yorker on board, who was buying rubber in anticipation of the needs of belligerents, and who knew most of the places in the world where rubber was to be raised or bought. His views on Australia we have forgotten, and his denunciation of the Indies, as places where the white resident must deteriorate, do not matter here. What we do recall is the dislike he expressed, as an Eastern American, for the pretensions of the West, especially of California. "There's nothing they've got," he would say, "that they don't want to tell you about. Why, you take a Californian, and he'll stand there and blow out his chest, and talk to you about his climate and climate! There's Los Angeles I want to tell you right now, that Los Angeles is the one place on God's earth, where you can get a sunstroke and a frozen foot at the same time."

Other Americans, Californians, to whom we