Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/268

 times they seem to consist of a few boards knocked together with telegraph wire; at a later stage they have added a handsome Town Hall, a Catholic cathedral in red brick, a humbler Church of England one but most of them retain the suburb of wooden-frame houses. They do not spring out of the bush in the same way that the towns of Western Australia do; perhaps because the clearings have been made larger. But everywhere you seem to see right back to the beginnings of the place, when a few people settled there and lived there; and gradually added this and that to it, till Townsville, or Maryborough, became to them the finest place in the world—because they called it home. Even Brisbane, with its broad bank-building-fronted Queen Street, retains something of the same aspect.

But Queensland is not its towns. Queensland, if you go but the smallest distance away from them, is the unconquered wild; the land where the blacks still signal with fires; where the forests smoulder and blaze for days in the burning sun; a land where it is possible still to be an explorer. Only a few days ago we were speaking to a professor in a laboratory in London, who lived ten years in Australia, and mentioned Queensland. His face lit up in a reminiscent gleam. "I once