After a voyage of a few days I arrived in safety at Gracemere. On the journey from Herbert river down the coast you pass two establishments for freezing meat for export, viz. Bowen and Rockhampton. This comparatively new industry in Australia has recently been largely developed, and is no doubt destined to become of great importance to the country, which will in this manner be able to dispose of its great surplus of meat. The largest amount is exported from New Zealand.

Gracemere was now in its winter dress. How poor Central Queensland looks to a person coming from the charming tropics of Northern Queensland! But here in the south the genuine Australian landscape is found, the characteristic feature of which is the fantastical and the gloomy; solemn gum-trees, which lose their white bark in winter just as European trees shed their leaves, stiff grass-trees, solemnlooking acacias, can hardly give any charm to a landscape. And yet I have seen beautiful landscapes outside Northern Queensland, as for instance the fern-tree gully in Victoria, where the most splendid tree-ferns grow at the feet of the highest trees in the world. The views from the heights in the rear of the capital of South Australia across the wide Adelaide plains are very imposing, as are also those obtained on a journey across the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, especially where the windings of the Paramatta river are seen in the distance.

Though I enjoyed in a high degree the pleasure attendant upon a return to the comforts of civilisation, I soon began to make expeditions northward along the coast.