12 
INTRODUCTION 
interior, and of the lily pools and tangled thickets of the 
northerly regions, where a more abundant supply of moisture 
and the neighbourhood of the sea lend to the country a softer 
and more luxuriant aspect, which contrasts sharply with the 
stern and forbidding character of the central desert. And 
everywhere, with an artist’s eye, he notes the colours of flowers 
and trees, of birds and beasts, of sky and cloud, which relieve 
and brighten what is too often the dull and featureless 
monotony of the bleak Australian scenery. 
It is true that the author’s powers of landscape painting 
find little scope in his purely anthropological works, where 
his attention is concentrated on the natives themselves rather 
than on their natural surroundings, but they impart vividness 
to the narrative of his travels in his latest book, Wanderings 
in Wild Australia. In the directness and simplicity of its 
style, in the impression which it leaves of truth to nature, 
in the fascination of its descriptions of strange folk and ever 
shifting scenery, Wanderings in Wild Australia may be com¬ 
pared to the Odyssey. If the w T riter did not tread enchanted 
ground, at least he moved among people who firmly believed 
in the power of enchantment and constantly resorted to it 
for the satisfaction of their wants and the confusion of their 
foes; if he did not encounter monsters like the Cyclopes or 
Scylla and Charybdis, at least he beheld with his own eyes 
the rocky pool in which the dreadful dragon, the Wollunqua, 
was believed to lurk, ready to dart out and devour its human 
victims. All this serves to invest the story of Spencer’s 
wanderings in Australia with an atmosphere of romance, 
and to lend it the character of an anthropological epic. 
The same restless and untiring pursuit of knowledge 
which led this knight errant of science to undertake these 
wanderings led him at the end of his life to extend his 
researches to another continent and another people, the 
aborigines of Tierra del Fuego. It was a gallant attempt, 
