10 
The Queensland Naturalist May, 1946 
lulled by the noise above and the peaceful hardly stirring 
air immediately around us, slept the sleep of the tired to 
whom wind and rain were as nought so long as the good 
old fire kept alight and we were warm. It was a very 
interesting experience. 
While it is very pleasant to look at pictures of the 
forest and the way thereto, it is a never-to-be-forgotten 
joy (or bore to the non-forest-minded inveigled into the 
trip), to clamber up a creek bed, over boulders and stones, 
skirting pools, climbing up past small waterfalls and some- 
times bigger ones, not forgetting to look for leeches occa- 
sionally, and then, intent on watching one’s feet, suddenly 
to hear a tantalising bird-call, but by the time one's bal- 
ance is assured the songster has gone and all the looking 
and peering cannot find it. Then after long hours of such 
toil most pleasurable and richly filled with interesting 
finds, after winding your way through the magnificent 
trees that fill some of the gorges, huge flooded gums, boxes, 
cedars, pines, too many to give names to, groves of palms, 
tree-ferns, and (if you leave the paths so well and truly 
laid by the State’s Forestry Department), getting tangled 
in lawyer-vines and dodging the prickly and stinging 
curses of mankind in the Park — stinging trees, nettles 
and such like trash — to arrive at last probably rather 
breathless on the top of a ridge from where some magni- 
ficent panorama spreads below and takes away most of 
the breath you have left; or perhaps you do not climb but 
keep to the creek and finish up at the end of a gorge whose 
sides rise sheer for hundreds of feet, at the foot of some 
fall whose beauty is ample repayment for the trouble 
taken and makes a regretful thought of the toiling journey 
back, rank heresy! 
My ordinary black-and-white photos cannot give any- 
thing like a realistic impression of the forest. I have seen, 
in the spring, at the foot of a high gorge, through a gap 
in the tree-tops, a line of reddish brown colouring higli 
in the drab grey rocks of its sides, slanting down into the 
green tree-tops and meeting the colourful young leaves of 
the red cedar trees which then by some freak of growth 
carried the vivid single line of colour deep into the gorge. 
I have wandered down into this same gorge along a 
pathway bordered by a hedge of lilac-coloured hovea 
many feet high, and climbed through the same wild-flower 
on the other side into a paradise of wild-flowers on top of 
the next ridge and after wandering through belts of 
