She still had in her mind’s eye an Australia with beautiful manorial
farm-houses and dainty, perfect villages. She never acquiesced in the
_uncreatedness_ of the new country, the rawness, the slovenliness. It
seemed to her comical, for instance, that no woman in Australia would
carry a basket. Harriet went shopping as usual with her pretty straw
basket in the village. But she felt that the women remarked on it. Only
then did she notice that everybody carried a suit-case in this discreet
country. The fat old woman who came to the door with a suit-case must,
she thought, be a visitor coming to the wrong house. But no. “Did you
want a cabbage?” In the suit-case two cabbages and half a pumpkin. A
little girl goes to the dairy for six eggs and half a pound of butter
with a small, elegant suit-case. Nay, a child of three toddled with a
little six-inch suit-case, containing, as Harriet had occasion to see,
two buns, because the suit-case flew open and the two buns rolled out.
Australian suit-cases were always flying open, and discharging groceries
or a skinned rabbit or three bottles of beer. One had the impression
that everybody was perpetually going away for the week-end: with a
suit-case. Not so at all. Just a new-country bit of convention.
Ah, a new country! The cabbage, for example, cost tenpence in the normal
course of things, and a cauliflower a shilling. And the tradesmen’s
carts flew round in the wilderness, delivering goods. There isn’t much
newness in _man_, whatever the country.
That old aeroplane that had lain broken-down in a field. It was nowadays
always staggering in the low air just above the surf, past the front of
Coo-ee, and lurching down on to the sands of the town “beach.” There, in
the cold wind, a forlorn group of men and boys round the aeroplane, the
sea washing near, the marsh of the creek desolate behind. Then a
“passenger” mounted, and men shoving the great insect of a thing along
the sand to get it started. It buzzed venomously into the air, looking
very unsafe and wanting to fall in the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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