INTRODUCTION 



Nature-study in our schools is fast producing a generation of 

 Australians trained to look upon the characteristic beauties 

 of our Australian skies, our trees, our flowers, oar birds with 

 a passionate appreciation almost unknown to our pioneering 

 fathers and mothers. It was natural that newcomers from 

 the Old World should have been impressed, and often unfav- 

 orably impressed, by the oddness of things here. Rural 

 sights to them had hitherto been sights of trim meadows 

 bordered by neat hedgerows, of well-cultivated fields and com- 

 fortable farmsteads, or of stately homes set in fair gardens 

 and far-reaching parks of magnificently-spreading trees. What 

 wonder, then, that they were at first almost repelled by the 

 strangeness and unfamiliarity of their new surroundings! 

 How could eyes accustomed to the decided greens and to the 

 somewhat monotonous shapeliness of the trees in an English 

 summer landscape find beauty all at once in the delicate, 

 elusive tints of the gum trees, or in the wonderfully decorative 

 lines of their scanty boughs and light foliage shown clear 

 against a bright sky? And so a land which is eminently a 

 land of color, where the ever-present eucalypts give in their 

 leaves every shade from blue-grays to darkest greens; where 

 the tender shoots show brilliantly in bright crimson, or duller 

 russets, or bright coppery-gold; and where tall, slender stems 

 change slowly through a harmony of salmon-pinks and pearl- 

 grays, has been called a drab-colored land. Even now, the 

 beauty of the gum tree is not sufficiently appreciated by Aus- 

 tralians, and we see all too few specimens in our suburban 

 gardens. For an appreciation of the decorative effect of our 

 young blue gums, we must go to the Riviera or to English 

 conservatories. 



Australia has suffered greatly from phrase-makers. There 

 is still much popular belief that our trees are shadeless, our 

 rivers are waterless, our flowers are scentless, our birds are 

 songless. Oddities in our flora and fauna have attracted the 

 notice of superficial observers, and a preference for epigram- 

 matic perfection, rather than for truthful generalization, has 

 produced an abundance of neatly-expressed half-truths, which 

 have been copied into popular literature, and even into school 

 books. Our English-bred poet, Gordon, writes of lands — 



"Where bright blossoms are scentless, 

 And songless, bright birds." 



and these lines are remembered better than his description in 

 the same poem of Spring — 



"When the wattle gold trembles 

 'Twixt shadow and shine, 



When each dew-laden air draught resembles 

 A long draught of wine." 



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