Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/329

 to the station, where the school children were just arriving from up country settlements. After passing some tea gardens, which looked oddly sophisticated in the bush, we found ourselves among banana fields and pineapples, but everything was more or less obscured by fine driving rain. There was still a fair number of scattered houses, built of wood and iron, with a deplorably drenched air, and handfuls of draggled English flowers in their little gardens among tropical fruits, paw-paws, and lemons. When the ascent begins the line soon enters the wonderful tropical forest—indescribable, unimaginable in the abounding luxuriance and the variety of its tangled, matted growth. The stately soaring eucalyptus is always the staple factor in Australian scenery, but here they are linked together and festooned with heavy ropes of giant creeper, "vines" they call them in the tropics.

In the thick undergrowth are ferns, paw-paw trees, bananas, mango trees, with dark glossy leaves and feathery flowers, and the poisonous "nettle tree," or "stinging tree" (Laportea gigas). The leaves are very large, of delicate pale green in colour, and covered with soft hairs. The stinging hairs, though not large, are so virulent that cattle have been known to die from the poison. An Australian botanist,