QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Today, in an age when we can change timezones, countries and climates in the space of a few hours, it is almost impossible to imagine how the early emigrants reacted to the different climates and landscapes of the Fifth Continent on the far side of the world. Gone were the crisp afternoons and early mornings in supremely elegant birch forests, their autumnal foliage a blazing spectacle of reds, oranges and yellows, covering the quiet tracks of the forest floor in a scrunching carpet of discarded leaves. The emigres came instead to hack out tracks through the musky sweetness of ‘the Bush’, redolent with its oily eucalyptus and other strange and pungent fragrances, humming with cicadas, and hordes of insects, dripping rivulets of sweat, as they fought their way through the sharp, coarse grasses in the airless cacophany

Even that could change dramatically, in the space of a kilometre or two horizontally, or a few hundred metres vertically: thickly and wetly jungled slopes, plateaus and hidden valleys dense with exotic rainforest, rich with ferns and tangled vines, alive with the sounds of entirely different wildlife carrying through the splash and babble of life-giving streams and waterfalls.

beneath the distant breezes hissing through the leaves of the canopy above.

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