INTRODUCTION. 
3 
on hearing a Skylark raining down a flood of delicious melody 
from far up at heaven's gate, but his joy is no whit greater than 
his who hears, in the dewy freshness of the early morning, the 
carol of the Magpie ringing out over an Australian plain. To 
those who live in countries where the winter is long jind bitter, 
any sign that the genial time of flowers is at hand is very wel- 
come. All over the countryside the first call of the Cuckoo, 
spring's harbinger, arouses the keenest delight in expectant lis- 
teners. This delight is, however, more than mere delight in the 
bird's song. And to those brought up with it year by year there 
comes a time when the call of the Cuckoo stirs something deep 
down below the surface of ordinary emotion. It is the resultant 
of multitudes of childhood experiences and of associations with 
song and story. I first heard the Cuckoo in Epping Forest one 
delicious May evening four years ago. It charmed me, but my 
delight was almost wholly that of association. All the English 
poetry I knew was at the back of the bird's song. Here in 
Australia we have no sharply-defined seasons, yet I find myself 
every spring listening eagerly for the first plaintive, insistent call 
of the Paliid Cuckoo. For me his song marks another milestone 
passed. 
Mal-cus Clarke wrote of the Laughing Jackasses as bursting 
into "horrible peals of semi-human laughter." But then 
Marcus Clarke was English-bred, and did not come to Aus- 
tralia till he was eighteen years old. It makes all the difference 
in our appreciaition of bird or tree or flower to have known 
it as a boy. I venture to think no latter-day Australian who 
has grown up with cur Kookaburra can have any but the 
kindliest of feelings for this feathered comedian. For myself, 
I confess that I find his laughter infectious, and innumerable 
times he has provoked me into an outburst as hearty and as 
mirthful as his own. More than half of our pleasure is due 
to the fact that the bird is 
**The same that in my schoolboy days I listened to." 
and to such a one we can say — 
"1 can listen to thee yet, 
Can lie upon the plain 
And listen, till T do beget 
That golden time again." 
It is time that we Australians fought against the generally 
received opinion that the dominant note of our scenery is weird 
melancholy. This is the note sounded mainly by those who 
were bred elsewhere, who came to us with other associations 
and other traditions, and sojourned among us. It will not be 
the opinion of the native-born when they find appropriate 
speech. 
"Whence doth the mournful keynote start? 
From the pure depths of Nature's heart? 
Or, from the heart of him who sings, 
And deems his hand upon the strings, 
Is Nature's own?" 
