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FOREWORD 



My mother tells me that when she was a girl she used to gather wild 

 flowers in Woollahra, and to walk across the paddocks from Surry Hills to 

 Ultimo. Sometimes she would go in a rowing boat to Garden Island, 

 where the picnic parties danced upon the grass to the music of a fiddle ; or, 

 on gala days, cross by the little sixpenny ferry to the bush-clad banks of 

 North Shore. 



I, in my turn, remember many a picnic to Mosman's Bay, where the 

 thick green brush and the little waterfall at the head of the bay made a 

 picture which even the modern Mosman cannot wipe out. Once, on a 

 never-to-be-forgotten occasion, we walked by a bush track to the far-off 

 Military Road, whose very name suggested the botmdary of civilisation ; 

 and on that walk, where now rows of suburban villas cover the ground, the 

 tea-tree spread its arms on every side of us with a wealth of pink and white 

 blossom that set my childish heart a-throbbing for sheer love of it. 



Sometimes, on rare occasions, we went by boat to Manly, that wonder- 

 land of childhood, which seemed at the very end of the world. There the 

 most venturesome of us scrambled over the rocks to Fairy Bower, or even as 

 far as Shelly Beach itself ; or sometimes we climbed the hill behind the old 

 Kangaroo to look for native roses and flannel flowers in the thick bush 

 beyond. Queenscliff, with its solitary little summer-house and its carpet of 

 wild flowers, was a journey only to be taken when one lived in Manly ; and 

 Freshwater well, the South Pole seems nearer to us now than did Fresh- 

 water in those childish days. 



And that is barely twenty years ago. But in the last twenty years 

 Sydney has grown so wide, that on every side the bush has had to give way 



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