| <26 October 1917>
|
| <"Bookshelf" Holiday. (By "Vigilant.")>
| Some, perhaps, there are who would question the
| appropriateness of "Vigilant" as a pen-name for the
| writer of a literary column. To some, no doubt, the
| name suggest the platitudinarian politics and amazing
| mathematics of a certain column in a certain
| contemporary; but, after all, "we had it first."
| However, the name is appropriate, for the price of a
| literary column - to its author
| - is eternal vigilance. He must
| forever be reading new books, and re-reading old
| ones. And thereby hangs a tale, or rather,
| confession.
| For the last few weeks, amidst the welter of
| election campaigning, "Vigilant" has been able to
| give but scant attention to either new books or old
| - in fact, apart from the uninspiring
| pages of electoral rolls, he has had time for no
| books at all. And so, all of a sudden, he finds that
| he has bottomed the well of his erudition. In fact,
| he feels like a holiday.
| Well, to change the person, come with me for a
| "Bookshelf" holiday. The Library, for the time, is
| closed; let us seek the Bush, whose gates are ever
| open. After all, the Bush is a mighty book. Its pages
| are broader and deeper, its illuminations more
| gorgeous, its symbolisms and figures of speech more
| subtle and holy than any written scroll can unfold.
| What writer has not been tempted to catch its
| accents? To translate into verse the weird whispering
| of the she-oak? To find the master word to compel
| visions of fern gully and waterfall to rise before
| the eyes? But one and all fall short, for the
| language of the Bush is a tongue so sacred that its
| mysteries and ritual may be spoken in none of the
| tongues of the cities.
| Cambridge-street is a long, red road. One end of
| it is an ordinary city street, but the other end juts
| out quite a distance into the Bush, and there cuts
| off abruptly. But a maze of sand tracks branch off
| from the end, and these lead, more or less directly,
| to an old tramway line, which, once on a time, used
| to carry loads of limestone from the hills near the
| ocean beach. Long since the rails and sleepers have
| disappeared, but the formation remains, and serves as
| an Ariadne clue to the King's Park bushman. Half an
| hour's stroll brings us to an unexpected scent. A
| small lake, or large pool, part of it occupied by
| paper-bark swamp, fills up the foreground, while at
| the back rises a steep limestone hill, with three
| humps on its back. A few low, long buildings, shed-like,
| and made of limestone - ancient
| coral rock - stand between the pool
| and the hill, and a sleek dairy herd bears witness to
| the perennial character of the former. When the
| shadow of the hill darkens the pool, and especially
| when a dark sky throws a gloom over the Bush, we find
| this pool quite a little suggestive of the uncanny.
| We would not be surprised, at any moment, if we ran
| across a Bunyip, or even Fafnir, the monstrous
| fen-dweller of Celtic fable.
| But a closer look discloses, if not any monsters
| of fable, at least some not less terrible denizens of
| pool and pond. Thousands of mosquito larvae swarm in
| every few feet of the water. Active, fantastic little
| mites, they are - something like a
| diver in his helmet, to look at, but furnished with a
| minute screw-propellor in the portion of their
| anatomy corresponding to the diver's shoulders. Every
| now and then one will come to the surface, hang on
| for a moment to take a breath, then off again, with
| its queer, jerky progression. When we say "hang on,"
| we must realise that the surface of the water
| - the most fragile thing in human
| experience - is to the mosquito an
| impassable wall. The adult can walk on it with
| safety, like a skater on ice, while the young hang to
| it from below when taking a breath.
| But lo! Why the commotion? It is the water tiger
| - the dragon-fly larva -
| the most terrible of the pond monsters. And
| this one is a fine specimen of his kind, nearly two
| inches long, and fearfully armed with claws and
| suckers. He pounces upon a water-boatman -
| an interesting little water-beetle, two of
| whose legs have been modified to form feathery oars
| - and in an instant, despite the
| creature's hard shell, the juices of his body have
| been withdrawn to nourish the monster.
|
we find exemplified in the
| quiet pool, equally with the jungle and the fishing
| banks.
| In the scrub the ubiquitous insect is still at
| work. Here is the case-moth caterpillar, enclosed in
| his tough case of silk, strengthened with short
| sticks, or even with small - very
| small, pebbles, and secure against the beaks of the
| cleverest birds, except only the ferocious
| "ring-eye," or "silver-eye," one of the few amongst the
| Bush creatures that kills and tortures for "sport."
|
|
as a cynic said of the
| Englishman.
| Yonder again is a cluster of saw-flies -
| or rather, of their young -
| commonly called "spit-fires". Nothing more obscene in
| appearance could be imagined. A dozen to thirty ugly
| over-coloured grubs, slinging tightly together, with
| but their heads free, twisting and writhing like the
| snakes on the head of Medusa. Ugh! Without their
| objectionable habit of spitting, they make us
| shudder. But after all, these dirty creatures are
| kind enough to advertise their presence by their
| "warning" coloration and pungent stench. They are
| not, after all, so morally degenerate as that
| beautiful spider, with the yellow spots on his back.
| Ah! You were deceived? You thought it was a flower?
| No, his (or rather, her) web is hung between two
| bushes, low down. In the centre are two small
| greenish-yellow pads, on which she places her feet.
| The yellow back completes the suggestion of a
| beautiful orchid. The "Spider orchid" is familiar to
| all. This creature might be called the "orchid
| spider."
| Let us leave the low ground, with its luxuriant
| growth of scrub - banxia, wattle and
| blackboy, amidst larger growth of jarrah and tuart,
| and matted with creepers of various sorts, with
| undergrowth of magnificent blue hovea -
| and climb the limestone ridge. First we pass
| the old lime-kilns - relics, 'tis
| said, of convict days ~~ then gradually mount higher
| into a belt of thorny, but fleshy-leafed scrub. Down
| lower the vegetation is fed by a perennially damp
| sub-soil; here the shower falls, and flows away, or
| is sucked down, down, too deep for the roots to
| reach. But as it falls the water is sucked up
| greedily and stored in the thick, furry leaves. So
| Nature adapts herself to desert conditions. Close to
| the ground are little bushes of heather, with sharp,
| horny leaves, and a brilliant red flower. The hard
| leaf is another desert trick of Mother Nature's. The
| moisture stored up inside cannot escape when bid by
| the drying easterlies.
| Well, we reach the first hump of the hill, and
| find to our surprise, that we are nowhere near the
| summit. Still, the view of the pools, the dairy farm,
| the sleek herd, and the encircling Bush is worth a
| pause. The vivid green of the pasture contrasts
| glaringly with the darker shades of the
| eucalyptus.
| But on we go, past the second hump, and up to the
| real summit. Gradually the scene opens out; peeps of
| the city, reaches of the river, and the blue range in
| the distance, and on the other hand a chaos of sand
| hills and limestone dunes. At last the top, and
| almost without warning the open ocean bursts upon us.
| Below lies Fremantle, beyond is Cockburn Sound, and
| out to the South-West, the festoon of islets and
| rocks - Garden Island, Carnac,
| Rottnest - like the teeth of a marine
| monster protruding from the blue. Far away to the
| north, on the very rim of the horizon, are three
| indistinct humps. They are the Three Sisters that
| overlook the Yanchep Caves.
| Well, the sun is sinking to rest behind the ocean.
| We must retrace our steps. Back to the city, and the
| library. We may take from our shelves
|
"The Insect,"
| by Jules Michlet;
| "The Spider," by J.H. Fabre;
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo">
| "Mutual Aid," by P Kropotkin;
| or "The
| Life of the Bee,"
| by Maeterlink -
| all magnificently written works that hold
| places equally high in Science and Literature. Or,
| nearer home, we may renew our acquaintance with our
| bush friends by glancing at the pages of some of our
| own Australian bush lovers and nature-students, such
| as MacDonald, Hall, and Leach, whose little handbooks
| on wild-life in general, birds, insects, etc., are
| written in simple style and without needless
| technicalities.
| Well, my friends, I trust you have enjoyed our
| "Bookshelf" ramble in the wilds of West Leederville.
| If it has done you as much good as it did me.