To love the west

To bring the empire to the desert

In Forrest, as in Sir Henry Parkes, Daisy saw the embodiment of her ideal. She spoke the same language, shared the same loyalty. Forrest talked of the ‘crimson thread of kinship with the mother country.’ He regarded the Empire as a ‘symbol of triumph of freedom, justice, civilisation and progress.’ She respected him as an explorer who had dared to follow in Eyre’s footsteps and to walk the waterless plain from Eucla to Fowler’s Bay, thankful to quench his thirst with the blood of a hawk. She admired him as a man of vision, who, with the help of engineer O’Connor, was realising his dream of a pipeline to bring water across three hundred and thirty miles to the thirsty diggers of Kalgoorlie.

To believe in the west

By the time she had returned to Perth, Daisy was a devotee of the new State that she called the ‘plain sister’ of the Commonwealth.

‘As one become more familiar with its gaunt gum tree, its apparently miserable attempts at water courses and rivers, its huge plains of sand and scrub, a certain harmony grows on one,’ she wrote. There was ‘the fascination of ugliness in the bush scenery of the West as there is in certain types of manhood.’

To enjoy the Nullarbor

Here there is nothing young that was not long since old. Here there is no germinating potency of nature. The mystery, beauty and freedom of these boundless plains will repel one whose artistic sense demands a more genial scene for its gratification.

There is a solemnity for some, a weirdness for others in this hushed immensity.

There is little travel along these desolate tracks. The mailman, ever anxious about horse feed and water, oddments of humanity [who] pass through on their way to fortune or defeat.

The air is so sensitive that the crack of a whip, the slow tread of the camels and the noise of the lumbering, broad-wheeled wagons can be heard for miles. Sometimes there are no signs to indicate that living things have ever drawn breath in this desolate and treeless plain. The solemn all embracing silence… is so impressive that one feels as if the moment of breaking will usher in some catastrophe. Even the echoes seem to be dead.

Nullarbor was named by the surveyor Delisser from the Latin, nullus arbor, for the great plain is utterly treeless, covered with salt-bush and blue-bush and other low and inconspicuous herbage. The natives believes it to be the abode of a mighty magic snake called Ganba or Jeedarra which ate any human that entered his territory… According to the natives, the blow-holes are the gates through which Ganba passes to his sea home.

To watch the sunset

Sunsets blaze and fade, and blaze again in these great empty wilds, and dawn sets her diadem over them. The light loitering winds carry delicate perfumes hither and thither, but all these places that once echoed with song or war-cry are now left to the birds and animals whose forebears witnessed the arrival of the humans, and who themselves are now witnessing their passing.

To read the book of nature

the mornings were spent in wondering from camp to camp, attending to the bodily needs of the scattered flock. I knew every bush, every pool, every granite boulder, but its age-old prehistoric name, with its legends and dream-time secrets, and its gradual inevitable change. There was no loneliness. One lived with the trees, the rocks, the hills and the valleys, the verdure and the strange living things within and about them. My meals and meditations in the silence and sunlight, the small joys and tiny events of my solitary walks, have been more to me than the voices of the multitude, and the ever-open book of Nature has taught me more of wisdom than is compassed in the libraries of men.