FROM Townsville northward, the track of vessels-bordered on the one hand by the breakwater of the Great Barrier Reef, and on the other by the majestic masses of the great Australian coast range, which flanks the shore line-is smooth and attractive. Should the voyager sail through the Hinchinbrook Pass, a lovely scene rejoices his eyes. The channel is some thirty miles in length. On the one hand rise the bold slopes of Hinchinbrook Island; on the other, at varying distances, the coast range presents its scarped and furrowed sides. The island is clothed with, a magnificent tropical growth of varied foliage. Here are tints of delicate fresh green; there, masses of darkest olive hue. Anon, jagged rocks thrust their blackness through the leafage, and in turn are smothered in jungles of pandanus and feathery fern.The whole hillside is fringed on the marge of the pellucid sea by the luxuriant drapery of the mangroves reflected in the watery mirror. Overhead, wafted on the trade-winds, masses of clouds drift by, casting cool and fleeting shadows on mountain side, ravine’ and sea, and hovering round the loftier peaks, ever changing the aspects of one of the loveliest views which the world affords.

Into this charming channel a number of rivers of minor rank discharge, each having its little town on its banks, and each flowing through alluvial tracts of great fertility, where the cultivation of sugar-cane, maize, bananas, and other tropical products occupies the scattered settlers. Thus, Dungeness is planted on the Herbert River; Cardwell comes next in geographical order; a few miles to the north is situated Mourilyan Harbour, a basin into which the Moresby River discharges. This port was, when first visited, regarded as particularly promising. The entrance is, however, extremely contracted, and owing to a sweeping tide which rushes through the narrow channel, approach is accompanied with some degree of risk even for steamships. The entrance between the headlands is but an eighth of a mile wide, and sunken rocks rising abruptly from the bottom contract the available channel to no more than eighty feet at low water. Through this narrow pass of deep water the tide races at the rate of from five to seven miles ail hour. Once through these narrows, however, a snug harbour opens out. A basin of deep water extends about one-third of a mile east and west, and about one-sixth of a mile north and south, with the advantage of steep-to banks on the north and south shores. The rest of the harbour area is shallow, and at the mouth of the Moresby the usual bar, with but four feet of water at low tide, restricts access to reaches of which the lower has ten feet of water for a mile, and the upper, ten miles in length, has a depth of no more than five feet.

The Johnstone River, discharging into Glady Inlet, has a very shallow bar, but is navigable for some eight miles for small craft. The little settlement of Geraldton is situated on this rivulet. The Mulgrave and Russell Rivers intervene between the Johnstone and Trinity Bay, a port of more immediate interest and promise than any since Cleveland Bay, which, indeed, must be regarded as distinctly inferior to the harbour of Cairns, as the town here created is named in honour of Mr. —now Sir —William Wellington Cairns, Governor of Queensland at the time of the formation of the settlement.

TRINITY BAY, at the bottom of which opens Trinity Inlet, the real future harbour of Cairns, was so named by Cook, who entered it on a Trinity Sunday. Fifty years later, King visited the bay, but neither of these navigators discovered the inlet, to which the probable future importance of the place must be in a great measure due. Trinity Bay itself is thoroughly sheltered from the southeast trade winds, which blow with little variation for half the year —from April to September. From November to March, during the prevalence of the northwest monsoon, the winds in these regions are variable, but generally from the northward and westward, with occasional calms and not infrequent violent gales. To such gales Trinity Bay lies fully exposed, but the propinquity of the Great Barrier Reef, right in the wind’s eye, although it does not temper the blast, moderates the sea, and the roadstead is still available for anchorage for vessels of burden. Small craft drawing not more than eight feet have access to the inlet at all states of the tide, except very low springs, when there are but six feet of water on the bar. The town has been established on a sandy timbered flat —but a few feet elevated above high water, and at the very apex of the bay —in part just opposite the shallowest part of the bar and partly on the entrance to the inlet. The situation, regarded as a pied-ƒ -terre for laying out a city, possesses few advantages. The low flat upon which the town is planted extends inland without change for several miles. Facilities for drainage there are none, and urban picturesqueness, which depends upon inequalities of elevation, can never be created. Originally the site was covered with a tropical scrub, of which traces still subsist; and in latitude sixteen degrees fifty-six minutes south a settlement on such a low site might have been expected to be unhealthy in the extreme. This expectation might have been intensified by the extraordinary moisture which here almost constantly keeps the soil in a condition of saturation. The Cairns district is, in fact, the centre of a coastal tract which, from a meteorological point of view, contradicts all prevailing ideas with respect to Australian climate. Here, in lieu of a deficiency of rainfall, there is a redundancy. What is termed the zone of heavy rainfall commences at Hinchinbrook Island, at the mouth of the Herbert River, and culminates at the Johnstone River and the Cairns district. This aqueous phenomenon is easily explained. In these regions the southeast trade winds, charged with moisture derived from the evaporation of the sunny surface of the Pacific Ocean, are intercepted by the lofty ridges of the great coast range, which flanks the eastern seaboard of the entire continent. In these latitudes, however, this range approaches to the littoral more closely than elsewhere, and heaves tip summits and ridges of exceptional altitude, culminating some distance south of Cairns in the elevations named by King the Bellender-Kerr mountains, at the particular request of Allan Cunningham, who desired to do honour to a friend in Scotland —John Bellender-Kerr, Esq.. These mountains attain a height of five thousand five hundred feet, and are merely the highest of a series of lofty eminences which spring from the sufficiently bold line of the main range, running nearly parallel with the coast at varying distances, nowhere very remote, along many leagues of these tropical regions. Thus arrested, the saturated sea breezes precipitate their watery burden with a resultant rainfall aggregating the enormous quantity of one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty inches in the year. It was currently stated that during the month of February, 1887, there fell at Cairns during the course of forty-eight hours a quantity of rain equal to the whole annual rainfall at Melbourne.

Such an opening of the windows of heaven might be expected to lay under water the entire surface of a flat tract such as that upon which Cairns stands; but the sol there is an open alluvium, into the constitution of which sand largely enters. The rainfall, consequently, is absorbed almost as fast as it is received, the ground retaining sufficient solidity nevertheless.

Despite all these conditions, so favourable to the development of zymotic diseases, Cairns is not an unhealthy place of residence. There, as elsewhere throughout northern Australia, the first disturbance of the soil and of the jungle was accompanied by considerable occurrences of low fever; but at Cairns, as at other places, that unwholesomeness has proved transitory. Looking at the place, one would pronounce it a fever-bed; regarding the residents, the prevalence of good health has to be admitted.

Although civic beauty can scarcely be expected ever to be among the attractions of the town, the views from it are prolific of charms which must be increased when, in course of time, the timber, which at the back intercepts the view of the mountains, shall be cleared away by the axe of the cultivator and settler. The one beauty of the town itself is its esplanade facing the ocean beach, and embellished with beautiful trees, single and in clumps, some of majestic proportions and all of rich dense foliage —relics of the tropical jungle. Beneath some of these, rude benches have been constructed, and there, perfectly shaded from the sun and fanned by ocean breezes, one may sit enjoying sea views and landscapes of varied beauty. Right in front extend the waters of Trinity Bay, merging into the ocean, their surface generally placid, and their waves, even when the northeast monsoon blows strongest, moderated by the buttresses of the Great Barrier Reef far at sea beyond the range of vision. A little to the right, the tree-clad heights of Cape Grafton engage the eye, its flanks broken by dusky ravines and scarred by bare patches where landslips have torn its surface. Nearer, on the inner base of the cape, a dense growth of mangroves, springing from the water’s edge, clothes a level area with its green foliage, and contracts the bay to the entrance of the land-locked inlet, up which a lengthy prospect extends, backed by a swelling mound of greenest verdure some five miles distant, and again beyond by the serrated ridges of the main range.

This inlet needs but the dredging of a channel through the bar to be accessible. For five miles it will then be a harbour fit to shelter navies, with wharfages practically limitless in extent, the water being deep close to the banks. Queensland possesses no other harbour with half its advantages, bordered and surrounded as it is by vast areas of the richest alluvial scrub-lands, of which already large tracts have been brought under cultivation as plantations of sugar-cane, bananas, and other tropical productions. The first plantation was undertaken by a Chinese proprietary, who gave it the name of Hop Wah, or Good Luck. A Victorian proprietary followed, and was in turn succeeded by others. It was feared at first that the excessive humidity would interfere with the production of sugar by favouring too rank a growth of cane, accompanied by a low density of the saccharine juice. These prognostications have not, however, been borne out. The yields from the mills, of which several very complete have been erected, besides a refinery, have been ample, and the sugar of a quality superior to the average of other localities. The natural wealth of the Cairns district and of the inland territory, of which its admirable harbour must render it the port, gives assurance of a future of immense prosperity. On every side of it the rich alluvial deposits washed down from the mountains maintain a florid vegetation. Dense jungly scrubs present a tangled wealth of tropic flora; ferns, orchids, and flowering plants clothe the soil, above them wave the broad leaves of the wild banana, while over all tower graceful palms, and mighty cedars of vast girth invite the axe of the timber-getter.

The town of Cairns as yet scarcely merits description. The streets re surveyed of ample width, and one boulevard of stores and public houses is surrounded by scattered residences of modest construction; practically not a single yard of street-way is yet formed. All the buildings are of wood, and with the exception of some of the government structures, utility and economy alone have been considered, elegance being reserved for a later development.

In their early days, Cairns, Mourilyan, and Port Douglas were rivals or the supreme position as the shipping port for the interior in these latitudes. The question was not one to be decided imply by the respective merits of the harbours a question equally crucial had to be solved. The main range, with its scarped cliffs, scrub-covered steeps, and intricate jumble of ravines and ridges, rose behind each of the rival coast towns in forbidding majesty, and barred access to the western lands. Numerous expeditions were launched from the different starting-points; from the Hodgkinson goldfield, also, parties toiled to breach the barrier from within. The task was in no ease less than formidable. The spurs and gullies, the impenetrable scrubs, the precipices and chasms which suddenly yawned before the explorer’s feet, the clinging vines which entangled them, the stinging-nettle trees which tortured them, driving man and horse frantic with pain, the lurking savages —all combined to oppose difficulties. Many parties scrambled through and over the barrier, but their narratives presented mere series of escalades, clamberings, lowerings with ropes, twistings, and turnings. Up to the present time, Port Douglas has the only road practicable for wheeled traffic. From Cairns there is a track suitable for packhorses and mules, but after a prolonged official inspection, it has been decided that the ranges behind Cairns can be more economically surmounted by a railway than those at Port Douglas, and accordingly a line is in course of construction from Cairns to Herberton, the little village capital of a remarkable tableland, the elevation of which confers upon it a climate where English fruits will ripen; it has streams of running water, while its granite rocks contain rich lodes of tin. Herberton, on the Wild River, is about fifty-five miles west of Cairns. The mineralised tract of country in this region is extensive, trending southwesterly, crossing the basins of the Walsh and Tait Rivers, and constituting an area of about eighty miles by twenty. Tin, copper, and silver lodes abound. As to the former metal, this district alone in the world, it is said, competes with Cornwall in the abundance of its lodes of tin, of which over one hundred have been opened out. A number of small centres of population are distributed over this area, wherever a rich discovery has led to the establishment of machinery. Watsonville, with a population of four hundred, contests the preš minence with Herberton for the present.

cont...