Читать книгу Rambles in Australia онлайн

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Western Australia is famous for its wild flowers. We were a month too early, but even so we saw many strange and beautiful varieties. They are more numerous here than anywhere else in the world, even now many have not been classified. The most characteristic are as unlike as possible to our delicate evanescent wild flowers at home; strongly growing, determined, having adapted themselves, by becoming wiry or leathery, to all exigencies of heat or drought. The banksia, for instance, looked as if a fir-cone had suddenly burst into bristling pink flowers; the hard cone of it is called by the natives a “mungite,” and is used to kindle fire. Some unobservant person once told the West Australians that their birds were all songless, their flowers all scentless, and being naturally self-depreciatory, they have quoted it ever since. The bird-notes are very beautiful and clear in quality of tone; the note of the magpie will at once occur to the most casual observer, to quote only one instance. Old Dampier, in 1699, on his first landing in Western Australia was struck with “the small birds, all singing with great variety of fine shrill notes.” He mentions too, being observant, as befits an explorer, “the small flowers growing on the ground, that were sweet and beautiful,” and where else is there a better description of the eucalyptus “sweet-scented and reddish within the bark,” and “with long narrow leaves ... on one side whitish and on the other green.” But the “racoons” (kangaroos) which were so numerous as to be easily caught, and were “very good meat,” are now but rarely to be seen, where he first sighted them.