INTRODUCTION. 
Nature-Study in our schools is fast producing: a generation of 
Australians trained to look upon the charactcnstic 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 slowrly 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." 
