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liked to get a snapshot of one.
Before going ashore, however, I had been warned not to take the camera as the W.A. people were very much "down" on people taking snaps. Since leaving Sydney I have not taken a single photo!
As in Melbourne the trains seemed to go very slowly, & after each stop started off with a big jerk. Our train started from Freemantle at 10.30 & took 50 minutes to reach Perth. The intervening country is flat & rather low-lying, that is to say not more than about 150 ft above sea level. The soil seemed sandy & of poor quality. In places there were stretchers of bush, eucalypts up to perhaps 50 ft high, banksias sat 20 ft., a few acacias & fewer casuarinas (she-oaks) being the chief members. Of grass there was little, Mesembreantheums [mesembryanthemum] (pig-faces) & a kind of salt-bush locally known as "smoke bush" from the greyish appearance which from a distance causes a mass of it to look a good deal like hanging smoke, being most plentiful.
In places the line ran thro' cuttings perhaps 15 ft high: the country rock(?) seemed to be of very recent origin, a more or less consolidated grit appearing to be the common type. In other places they were cutting thro' sand which was kept back by sleepers (old railway) being laid on there sides. Leaving Freemantle there were one or two pretty peeps of the shore-line, beach, & water, & at one spot I noticed a fort, apparently old & out of repair.