86 CONFESSIONS OF A BEACHCOMBER 



ing for a few hours her orderly and kindly ways, Nature 

 runs amok, raving and shrieking. Her transient irrespon- 

 sibleness and mischievousness are then cited as everyday, 

 persistent vices. Not so. Nature is rational even in her 

 most passionate moments. Vegetation, rank and gross as 

 in an unweeded garden, requires vigorous lopping and 

 pruning. These twenty-year-interval storms comb out 

 superfluous leaves and branches, cut out dead wood, send 

 to the ground decayed and weakly shoots, and scrub and 

 cleanse trunks and branches of parasitic growths. All is 

 done boldly, yet with such skill that in a few weeks losses 

 are hidden under masses of clean, insectless, healthy, bright 

 foliage. The soil has received a luxurious top-dressing. 

 Trees and plants respond to the stimulus with magical 

 vigour, for lazy, slumbering forces have been roused into 

 efforts so splendid that the realism of tropical vegetation 

 is to be appreciated only after Nature has swept and 

 sweetened her garden. 



A more vivid and more idealised medium than the poor 

 one which with diffidence I employ were essential if enter- 

 tainment alone were sought in these pages ; but even a 

 faint and imperfect etching of one Australian scene, little 

 known even to Australians, may in some degree tend to 

 enlightenment. 



Many have told of the thin forests of Queensland, the 

 open plains, and the interminable downs whereon the 

 mirage plays with the fancies of wayfarers ; and of the 

 dust, heat and sweat of cattle stations. Has not the 

 " Never Never Country " inspired many a traveller and 

 more than one poet ? It is well to realise that we have 

 such bountiful land, and to be proud of the men capable of 

 investing its vastness, monotony and prosaic wealth with 

 poetic imagery. Is it not also wise to remember now and 

 again that Queensland possesses two types of tropical 

 climate, accentuated by boundaries having far greater 

 significance than those which divide tropical from tem- 

 perate Australia, and worlds apart in their distinctions? 

 Is not the land of the banana, the palm and the cedar > 



