'Come North And Look!' Cried The Afrites Of The Railway.
'You're only on
the fringe of it here.' I preferred to keep the old road, and to gape at
miracles accomplished since my day.
The old, false-fronted,
hollow-stomached Western hotels were gone; their places filled by
five-storey brick or stone ones, with Post Offices to match.
Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a
town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a
mile away and look back on a place - as one holds a palimpsest up against
the light - to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings. Each
town supplied the big farming country behind it, and each town school
carried the Union Jack on a flagstaff in its playground. So far as one
could understand, the scholars are taught neither to hate, nor despise,
nor beg from, their own country.
I whispered to a man that I was a little tired of a three days' tyranny
of Wheat, besides being shocked at farmers who used clean bright straw
for fuel, and made bonfires of their chaff-hills. 'You're 'way behind
the times,' said he. 'There's fruit and dairying and any quantity of
mixed farming going forward all around - let alone irrigation further
West. Wheat's not our only king by a long sight. Wait till you strike
such and such a place.' It was there I met a prophet and a preacher in
the shape of a Commissioner of the Local Board of Trade (all towns have
them), who firmly showed me the vegetables which his district produced.
They were vegetables too - all neatly staged in a little kiosk near the
station.
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