Children of Wild Australia
9781465669261
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
This little book is all about the children of wild Australia—where they came from, how they live, the weapons they fight with, their strange ideas and peculiar customs. But first of all you ought to know something of the country in which they live, whence and how they first came to it, and what we mean by "wild Australia" to-day, for it is not all "wild"—very, very far from that. Australia is a very big country, nearly as large again as India, and no less than sixty times the size of England without Wales. Nearly half of it lies within the tropics so that in summer it is extremely hot. There are fewer white people than there are in London, in fact less than five millions in all and more than a third of these live in the five big cities which you will find around the coast, and about a third more in smaller towns not so very far from the sea. The further you travel from the coast the more scattered does the white population become, till some hundred miles inland or more you reach the sheep and cattle country where the homes of the white men are twenty or even more miles apart. Further back still lies a vast, and, as far as whites are concerned, almost unpeopled region into which, however, the squatter is constantly pushing in search of new pastures for his flocks and herds, and into which the prospector goes further and further on the look-out for gold. This country we call in Australia "the Never-Never Land," and it is this which is wild Australia to-day. It lies mostly in the North and runs right up to the great central desert. It is there that the aboriginals, or black people, are found. The actual number of these black people cannot be exactly ascertained, but there are probably not more than 100,000 of them left to-day. Much of wild Australia is made up of vast treeless plains and huge tracts of spinifex (a coarse native grass) and sand. Sometimes in the North-west one travels miles and miles without seeing a tree except on the river banks, but in Queensland there is sometimes dense and almost impenetrable jungle, and mighty, towering trees, with many beautiful flowering shrubs. All alike is called "bush," which is the general term in Australia for all that is not town. The animals of wild Australia are most interesting and numerous. Several kinds of kangaroo (from the giant "old man," five feet or more in height, to the tiny little kangaroo mice no larger than our own mice at home), make their home there, and emus may often be seen running across the plains. Gorgeous parrots and many varieties of cockatoos are found in great numbers, snakes are numerous, whilst the rivers and water-holes teem with fish. Wild dogs, or dingos, too, are very numerous.
