Expedition.

Photos by Ralph L. Miller.

Engravings by Patterson Shugg & Co., from Paintings by Miss Ethel M. Paterson.

INTRODUCTION.

Nature-study in our schools is fast producing a generation of Australians trained to look upon the characteristic beauties of our Australian skies, our trees, our flowers, our birds with a passionate appreciation almost unknown to our pioneering fathers and mothers. It was natural that newcomers from the Old World should have been impressed, and often unfavorably impressed, by the oddness of things here. Rural sights to them had hitherto been sights of trim meadows bordered by neat hedgerows, of well-cultivated fields and comfortable farmsteads, or of stately homes set in fair gardens and far-reaching parks of magnificently-spreading trees. What wonder, then, that they were at first almost repelled by the strangeness and unfamiliarity of their new surroundings! How could eyes accustomed to the decided greens and to the somewhat monotonous shapeliness of the trees in an English summer landscape find beauty all at once in the delicate, elusive tints of the gum trees, or in the wonderfully decorative lines of their scanty boughs and light foliage shown clear against a bright sky? And so a land which is eminently a land of color, where the ever-present eucalypts give in their leaves every shade from blue-grays to darkest greens; where the tender shoots show brilliantly in bright crimson, or duller russets, or bright coppery-gold; and where tall, slender stems change slowly through a harmony of salmon-pinks and pearl-grays, has been called a drab-colored land. Even now, the beauty of the gum tree is not sufficiently appreciated by Australians, and we see all too few specimens in our suburban gardens. For an appreciation of the decorative effect of our young blue gums, we must go to the Riviera or to English conservatories.

Australia has suffered greatly from phrase-makers. There is still much popular belief that our trees are shadeless, our rivers are waterless, our flowers are scentless, our birds are songless. Oddities in our flora and fauna have attracted the notice of superficial observers, and a preference for epigrammatic perfection, rather than for truthful generalization, has produced an abundance of neatly-expressed half-truths, which have been copied into popular literature, and even into school books. Our English-bred poet, Gordon, writes of lands—

and these lines are remembered better than his description in the same poem of Spring—

It is true that we have scentless, bright blossoms; but Australia is the home of the richly-perfumed wattle, and the boronia, with its never-cloying fragrance; while there is, perhaps, no forest more odorous than a forest of eucalypts. It is true, too, that we have bright birds that have no excellence in song; but it is also true that, in this favored land, there is a far greater proportion than usual of fine song-birds.

The first generations of Australians were not taught to love Australian things. We "learned from our wistful mothers to call Old England home." Our school books and our story books were made in Great Britain for British boys and girls, and naturally they stressed what was of interest to these boys and girls. We read much about the beauty of the songs of the Lark, and the Thrush, and the Nightingale, but we found no printed authority for the belief that our Magpie is one of the great song-birds of the world; we read of the wonderful powers of the American Mocking-Bird, and did not know that our beautiful Lyrebird is a finer mimic; we learned by heart Barry Cornwall's well-known poem on "The Storm Petrel," and did not know that one of the most interesting of Petrel rookeries is near the harbor gate of Melbourne; and I remember well a lesson I heard as a boy on the migration of birds, in which the teacher took all of his illustrations from his boyish experiences in the South of England, and gave us no idea that the annual migration of our familiar Australian birds to far-off Siberia is a much more wonderful thing.

But all this is being rapidly changed. In the elementary schools Nature-study is steadily improving, and children are being given an eye for, and an interest in, the world of Nature around them. Our school books are now written from the Australian standpoint, and more use can, therefore, be made of the child's everyday experience. Field Naturalists' clubs are doing much to extend the area of specialized Nature-study, and their members are giving valuable assistance to the schools by taking part in the programs for Arbor Day, Bird Day, and the like. The growing interest in the Australian fauna and flora is further evidenced by the frequent reservations by Government of desirable areas as national parks and sanctuaries for the preservation of Australian types. Last, but not least, is the production by capable Nature students of special books on some form of Nature-study, such as this Bird Book by Mr. Leach.

To our parents, Australia was a stranger land, and they were sojourners here. Though they lived here, they did not get close enough to it to appreciate fully its natural beauty and its charm. To us, and especially to our children, children of Australian-born parents, children whose bones were made in Australia, the place is home. To them Nature makes a direct appeal, strengthened by those most powerful of all associations, those gathered in childhood, when the foundations of their minds were laid. The English boy, out on a breezy down, may feel an exaltation of soul on hearing a Skylark raining down a flood of delicious melody from far up at heaven's gate, but his joy is no whit greater than his who hears, in the dewy freshness of the early morning, the carol of the Magpie ringing out over an Australian plain. To those who live in countries where the winter is long and bitter, any sign that the genial time of flowers is at hand is very welcome. All over the countryside the first call of the Cuckoo, spring's harbinger, arouses the keenest delight in expectant listeners. This delight is, however, more than mere delight in the bird's song. And to those brought up with it year by year there comes a time when the call of the Cuckoo stirs something deep down below the surface of ordinary emotion. It is the resultant of multitudes of childhood experiences and of associations with song and story. I first heard the Cuckoo in Epping Forest one delicious May evening four years ago. It charmed me, but my delight was almost wholly that of association. All the English poetry I knew was at the back of the bird's song. Here in Australia we have no sharply-defined seasons, yet I find myself every spring listening eagerly for the first plaintive, insistent call of the Pallid Cuckoo. For me his song marks another milestone passed.

Marcus Clarke wrote of the Laughing Jackasses as bursting into "horrible peals of semi-human laughter." But then Marcus Clarke was English-bred, and did not come to Australia till he was eighteen years old. It makes all the difference in our appreciation of bird or tree or flower to have known it as a boy. I venture to think no latter-day Australian who has grown up with our Kookaburra can have any but the kindliest of feelings for this feathered comedian. For myself, I confess that I find his laughter infectious, and innumerable times he has provoked me into an outburst as hearty and as mirthful as his own. More than half of our pleasure is due to the fact that the bird is