Australia -- Description and travel; New Zealand -- Description and travel; Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972
Leaving Brisbane one day during his visit to that city, the Prince
proceeded by train through a well-wooded country of rich black soil,
just then a quagmire from heavy but welcome rain. He touched at a number
of centres, including Ipswich, head-quarters of woollen mills and
coal-mines, and Harrisville and Boonah, country towns where farming and
pastoral communities predominate. Every stopping-place had been
converted by unpaid local labour into a beflagged forest of greenery, in
the midst of which the inhabitants of the entire neighbourhood, also
many from far distant stations, had assembled. At Ipswich the streets
were lined by operatives and miners, and the welcome of this important
place included a car procession through decorated streets, a popular
reception, a mayoral address, and a civic luncheon served to the strains
of one of the largest and best trained choirs in the State. Vocal music
as the accompaniment of food was an unaccustomed luxury to many of those
present, but it did not appear to interfere with the general appetite.
At Boonah the proceedings were simpler but not on that account less
impressive, although they took place in a pelting rainstorm. The Prince
waded through an ankle-deep stream of flood-water to an exposed
platform, where, surrounded by a crowd of squatters, stockmen, farmers
and their families, including large numbers of women and children, all
standing in the downpour with streaming mackintoshes and umbrellas, he
unveiled a fine marble war-memorial bearing three hundred names. He also
shook hands with relatives of the fallen, and with numbers of returned
men, nurses and other war-workers.
On the way back to Brisbane further centres were visited. Amongst them
were Maryborough, a manufacturing and coal-mining city, where the steel
skeletons of two twelve-thousand-ton steamers, under construction for
the Commonwealth Government, towered amidst the decorations. One of the
arches was surmounted by a group of blacks in native costume, armed with
bows, arrows and spears, which they wielded realistically. Another
carried a dozen diggers in uniform. Other places visited were Tiaro,
where the assemblage that greeted the Prince consisted chiefly of
agriculturalists; Gympie, where the returned men, assembled in a
war-memorial park, included gold-miners as well as farmers; Cooroy,
where the Prince made the acquaintance of a large logging community;
Landsborough, where sugar-cane planters, and banana and orange-growers
preponderated, and Beerburrum, Queensland's biggest soldier settlement,
where he shook hands with a large number of returned men engaged in
growing pineapples.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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