122 
The Queensland Naturalist. 
November, 1922 
spent several years in Queensland at no distant date; he was 
engaged on a station property near Charters Towers, but 
seems, strangely enough, to have taken only scant interest 
in birds at that period. 
Later arrivals in the field are Messrs. F. L. Berney, 
.an Englishman who has learned much of West Queensland 
birds in the course of several years in pastoral pursuits; 
\V. G. and R. C. Harvey, of Mackay, young fellows who 
have developed into expert photographers of birds; and 
D. W. Gaukrodger, of Blackall. It is very fitting that Mr. 
Gaukrodger, who, though only a “recruit,’ 7 is doing fine 
work in the photographing of birds, should be stationed at 
Alice Downs, the scene of Mitchell’s explorations in the 
forties, and a district visited by Leichhardt, Gilbert, 
Gregory, Elsey, Lumholtz, and Favenc. In addition, there 
are many good bush naturalists who are not so well known 
as they deserve to be. Notable among them is Mr. Walter 
Petrie (of the Queensland Forest Service and a son of the 
famous Tom Petrie), who is certainly one of the cleverest 
imitators of bird-calls known to Australia. 
As a matter of course, there are several books dealing 
with various phases of settlement in Queensland that have 
more or less interesting references to the birds. Tom 
Petrie's Reminiscences is one such; Dr. John Dunmore 
Lang’s championship of Queensland as “the future cotton 
held of Great Britain” is another. Bush Life in Queens- 
land , , by A. C. Grant (London, 1888) has some entertain- 
ing notes on the wonderful Bower- birds of the interior. 
A book of a similar nature is Wild Life and Adventure in 
the Australian Bush , by Arthur Nicholls, F.G.S., F.R.G-S., 
a record of squatting experiences about the Maranoa and 
northward during the sixties and seventies. One of 
Nicholls ’s stories concerns the capture of a bushranger, 
whose presence in a patch of scrub had been made known 
to pursuers by the clatter of a pair of Kookaburras. 
According to Nicholls, the comment of the bushranger was 
definite. “If it hadn’t been for them birds,” he 
said, “you and all your black devils would never have 
fetched me alive out of that scrub!” 
There are, probably, various other books dealing 
with life in Queensland in which passing attention has 
been given to birds, but the ones mentioned above will 
serve as examples. Seme productions of the kind make 
unpleasant reading because of the lists of birds which the 
authors assisted to slaughter; in several cases the birds 
were shot while breeding. 
