A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip

Once or twice in those wide stretches we saw a motor car whizzing over the weary miles, where only the shortcomings of the bush road imposed a limit to speed; and the presence of that vehicle there had more significance to us who had long lived out back than it could have had to coastal dwellers.

It may be said that modern inventions, more than the spread and increase of settlement, had altered the aspect of life in the bush within recent years. Among the most potent factors in this change must be reckoned the motor car and the telephone. They had shortened distances, brought once remote places near to populous centres; and that alone had enveloped the outposts with a different atmosphere to what was formerly experienced. They took away the feeling of isolation, so that the settler no longer considered himself an exile as he once did. Nor was he an age behind the times in his ideas and methods, or individualised in a world of his own, as he used to be, for he was as much in touch with the hub of the universe as the rest of his kind. These two mediums of comparatively rapid connection had removed forever a phase of Australian life that had its charm and its romance, but was invested in no small degree with peril and hardship. No matter where the new settlements were formed in these later days, even in the virgin tracts of the Northern Territory, the exact circumstances of the former periods did not prevail, and so far as communities, however scattered, were concerned, could never return.