ADVANCED AUSTRALIA
Chapter I
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
MOST voyages are not travelling, now-a-days; but merely existence on a mail steamer. Again, more than one hundred and fifty globe-trotters pass through the Suez Canal every week on their way to Australia; and though the number is not in itself overwhelming, imagination boggles at what would happen if every globe-trotter committed his voyage to print, as most of them do to paper. Yet, on the other hand, not to keep a stylograph in your board-ship coat-pocket were the merest profligacy. For, east of Suez, a man sometimes raises, not only a thirst for "pegs," but a hunger for information; because, though the world is undoubtedly shrinking, and the (till '95) inaccessible desert places of (for example) Kalgoorlie are now graced by an excellent club, which is within an easy thirty days of London, yet there are such things, even now, as local atmospheres. And an outward Australian liner carries about with her somehow, stowed away in her inner consciousness, a local atmosphere of the Bush which she dons with her suit of awnings somewhere about the Red Sea. You have left Charing Cross behind you at the starting-end of the long trail, and the talk henceforward, under the patronage of the
