Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/349

 direct port of call in Australia. It will in time be connected by railroad with the southern states, as it now is by the telegraph service. In the interior nomadic tribes of blacks hunt and fish and wander; hardy settlers have pitched their homesteads in a clearing in the forest, and raise cattle there, with the nearest neighbour a hundred miles away; the lonely buffalo hunter plies his lucrative trade with the help of native hunters.

The Australians themselves do not seem to know very much more about the Northern Territory than the average Englishman. They speak of it as an arid wilderness, much in the same way as they regard Western Australia; yet, to the visitor from home, it is the beauty and the wildness of Western and Northern Australia, that make an appeal far more profound than that of the busy, civilised, and comparatively populous southern and eastern states. With all their differences they are still too much like home to stir the imagination. What is popularly known about the Northern Territory is largely learned from the writings of a clever Australian woman,[A] who has lived the isolated yet stimulating life of the settler's wife in the interior. The part to be played by women in the future of the Northern Territory is a very important one. It

[Footnote A: Mrs. Æneas Gunn, "We of the Never Never."]