The sunshine warms the clean sands of endless beaches thronged with bronzed battalions of bathers, youth and beauty at their best, shooting the breakers, riding on surfboards, or lying on the sands courting the sun. Here is sea-bathing on a scale unequalled elsewhere in the world. Each capital city possesses its miles of beaches conveniently close at hand, and beyond the beaches stretches the sea, emerald-green in the shallows, a deep blue beyond, wine-dark on the horizon, creaming white with the breakers, and all sparkling with countless points of light under the southern sun.
The visitor must, of course, first make acquaintance with the capital cities of the States lying on the seaboard—modern cities all, two with populations of over 1,000000, end each a thriving centre of business and industry, with miles of sunlit beach and mountain playground. Perth, the western gateway to the continent, to which visitors sailing from the Old World first come, rises above the wide blue stretches of Melville and Perth Waters, with the blue ranges beyond, in a truly beautiful setting; gold and wheat and timber are in the background. Adelide lies on a level plain between the picturesque Int. Lofty Ranges and the sapphire waters of Gulf St. Vincent, a city of churches, park lands and wide boulevards set down amid orange and olive groves and vineyards on the adjacent foothills.
Then comes Melbourne with its bustling, broad, tree-lined and symmetrically-planned streets and boule-yards, its tall, clean buildings and far-flung garden suburbs, its miles of curving beaches round the huge Port Phillip Bay, and its lovely hill country in the nearby Dandenongs.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.