The Queensland Naturalist. 
;6 
April, 1922 
Island, commemorates the arrival of a vessel of that name 
at Rockingham Bay, in company with the Rattlesnake, 
in May, 1848. The leader of the expedition was Edmund 
B. Kennedy, the naturalist T. Wall, and the botanist 
W. Carron. The story of this fateful journey, which is 
told by Carron as an addition to The Voyage of the 
Rattlesnake, needs little recapitulation. Kennedy and 
party left the Tarn o’ Shanter and Rattlesnake at 
Dunk Island, and, after experiencing severe privations, 
nearly all were killed by blacks. Wail died on December 
28, 1848, two days before the scanty residuum of the party 
was snatched from death by a rescuing party guided by 
the faithful Jacky Jacky. The chief ornithological 
discovery of the trip was the Cassowary. Wall took one 
of these big birds, tor the first time, but had to drop the 
skin. A rough description was given by his brother, W. S. 
Wall, then curator of the Australian Museum (Sydney), in 
the Illustrated Sydney Herald of 3rd June, 1854, under the 
name of Casuarius australis, and this was accepted by 
Gould. 
Kennedy’s expedition was not the most notable one 
made in Queensland during the forties. That honour is 
undoubtedly with Sir Thomas Mitchell, who, in 1845, pene- 
trated the Maranoa and the interior, as far as what he called 
the Victoria River, now known as the Barcoo, and the Alice 
River, presumably called after his wife. It was unfor- 
tunate that Mitchell did not have an ornithologist with him 
on that great trip; nevertheless, his Journal ( Tropical 
Australia) contains many interesting bird-notes, and 
shows a generally healthy appreciation of the good cheer 
of the birds. “The charm of a beginning,” Mitchell writes 
at one stage, “seemed to pervade all nature, and *the songs 
of many birds seemed like the orchestral music before the 
commencement of any theatrical performance. Such a 
morning, in such a place, was quite incompatible with the 
brow of care.” A healthier attitude, surely, than that of 
one or two other early writers who described the Australian 
bush as melancholy and our birds as songless! Mitchell 
could even forgive the screeching of the White Cockatoos, 
in admiration of the spotless birds as “amidst the 
unbrageous foliage, forming dense masses of shade,” they 
“sported like spirits of light.” 
Perhaps it should be suggested at this point that the 
attitude of early observers (from scientists to convicts) in the 
wonderland of Australia seems to have been, as it is to-day, 
largely a reflex of the mind of the individual. The “bird 
that laughs at you” is, and probably always has been, one 
