Vlll 
Introduction. 
terrible place to be found on earth-waterless and barren, and with food neither for man nor beast 
uninhabitable for ever, and with much difficulty, and with great privation and suffering, brings home 
his scurvy-stricken followers. Another finds it a garden, with running streams and green grass, and 
his narrative reads like a series of pleasant picnics. While yet a third has to tell of floods, and wide 
plains turned into inland seas, and bare escapes from death by drowning where the first with fevered 
skin sought in vain for water to quench his burning thirst. 
A land, where, wonderful to tell, the so-called honeysuckle is a Banksia, the cherry Exocarpus, the 
apple Angophora; where crows are shrikes, parrots are honey-suckers, and a turkey has been classed 
as a vulture. 
A land, said to be without song birds, but on the contrary a country where one of her crow- 
shrikes sings with such an organ-like fulness, variety, and power, that Sir Bulwer Lytton tells us 
that to such carollings the nightingale herself must give up the prize. 
A land, unexcelled in the gorgeousness of plumage displayed, in the graceful forms, and 
strange habits, of her avifauna. The various species of the unrivalled parrot family, the magnificent 
regent bird, the rifle bird, the tricolored ephthinura, and the wondrously beautiful blue and red 
warblers, illustrate the first; the tail of the lyre-bird, the elegant little doves, and the charming 
fly-catchers, prove the second ; while where, the wide world over, could stranger habits be found 
than those of the bower birds or the regent bird, who build most exquisitely beautiful groves, 
adorned with brilliant feathers, bright stones, and shining shells, simply as play-grounds, or rather, 
perhaps, courting lanes, where the males display their gorgeous golden plumage, or ruffle up their 
mauve collars for the delegation of their brides, or chase them up and down these fairy walks; or 
those of the mound-building megapode, who, but the size of a hen-pheasant, tosses up a great heap 
of vegetable soil, fifteen feet high and sixty feet in circumference, in which she lays her eggs, to be 
hatched by solar rays. 
A land, complained of as utterly dull and wearying in its scenery, yet outside the bounds where 
all wild life has been ruthlessly exterminated by the ever-advancing bands of tillers of the soil, the 
intelligent quiet eye may ever find more than sufficient to interest the mind in noting the ways, the 
habits, the little eccentricities of bird life. While travelling those flat, seemingly interminable salt-bush 
plains of the Lower Murray and Murrumbidgee, treeless and hill-less, many pleasant hours have yet 
been spent in company with Jenny Wren, and her blue and silver-backed husband (malurus 
leucopterus), watching the dexterous way in which the salt bushes were threaded, a deftness of flight 
unsurpassed by any bird I have ever noticed; and then when deemed unwatched, out would ring a 
song of joy and gladness, not loud, but full and sweet, that gave a cheering life to the surrounding 
dullness. In the forests of eucalypti, what can be more animating than to note the flight of the honey¬ 
eating lorrikeets, as with a perfect furor of haste, and loud cries of angry impatience, they hurl 
themselves—like a squadron of cavalry on the enemy—into the leafy strongholds of the gum-trees, 
despoil their flowers of hidden nedar ; rising again, now with loud cries of vidory, on swift wing! 
with arrowy flight, seek new forays. Near the farms, the various families of the broad-tailed 
parrakeets (platycerci) exhibit a tameness akin to that of the impudent house sparrow of the father- 
land ; and not unfrequently I have noticed the rosellas (p. eximius) hardly fly a dozen yards along 
the road on which I was driving. On the quiet little grassy plains, surrounded by trees, those most 
exquisite of all the parrot tribe, the psephoti and euphema, delight us for many an hour as so daintily 
* Strange Story . 
