My Tropic Isle

From the tinted tips of fragile corals to the ooze on the edge of the beach sand there is seething life. Exposed by the ebb tide, the sun-caressed slime glitters and shimmers, s...

As I have had the privilege of listening in confidence to both sides of the story, and as the main facts are minutely corroborative, I judge Tom's recitation of them to be quite...

Repeated observations and diary records have established August 12th as the beginning of the local "bird season." About that date two of the most notable birds arrive from the N...

How quaint seems the demand for details of life on this Isle of Scent and Silence! Lolling in shade and quietude, was I guilty of indiscretion when I babbled of my serene affair...

Among those birds of North Queensland jungles which have marked individualistic characters is that known as the koel cuckoo, which the blacks of some localities have named "call...

Twelve years of open-air life in tropical Queensland persuade me that I am entitled to prerogative of speech, not as an oracle or a prophet on the prodigious subject of the weat...

Not all the energies of the blacks of North Queensland in their natural state are absorbed in the search for and pursuit and capture of food; nor are all their toys imitative of...

He was a tremulous long-legged foal on the Christmas Day we became known to each other. I accepted him as an appropriate gift, and he regarded me with a blending of reserve, cur...

"'Be advised by a plain man, (said the quaker to the soldier), 'Modes and apparels are but trifles to the real man: therefore do not think such a man as thyself terrible for thy...

His family was not in any sense artistic. Of his lineage all had been forgotten, save a few of the many failings of his grandsire. So none could tell whence the talent that burs...

Among the resident birds one of the most interesting from an ornithological standpoint is that known as the grey-rumped swiftlet (COLLOCALIA FRANCICA), referred to by Macgillivr...

Though certain species of molluscs have their respective habitats, and that which is considered rare in one part may be common in another, there are few which have not a general...

More of a Dutchman in build than Arab--broad-based, bandy-legged, stubby, stolid, and slow; spare of his speech, but nimble with his fingers in all that appertains to the riggin...

"The north-east spends his rage; he now shut up Within his iron cave, the effusive south Warms the wide air and o'er the vault of heaven Breathes the big clouds with vernal show...

Those branches of the cultural enterprise which depend upon my own unaided exertions fail, I am bound to confess, consistently. However partial to the results of the gardener's...

Among the commonest of fish in the shallow waters of the coast are the rays, of which there are many species--eighteen, according to the list prepared by Mr. J. Douglas Ogilby....

"Go and argue with the flies of summer that there is a power divine yet greater than the sun in the heavens, but never dare hope to convince the people of the South that there i...

"Some day ere I grow too old to think I trust to be able to throw away all pursuits, save natural history, and to die with my mind full of God's facts instead of men's lies."--C...

So much of the time of the Beachcomber is spent sweeping with hopeful eyes the breadths of the empty sea, policing the uproarious beaches, overhauling the hordes of roguish reef...

Am I, living in or rather off the land of magnificent distances, entitled to claim as a neighbour a friend one hundred miles away? Sentiments obliterate space. With the lonesome...

Some of the blacks of my acquaintance are ardent believers in ghosts and do posit the existence of personal "debils-debils." Seldom is a good word to be said of the phantoms, wh...

The rains which came at the New Year flooded all the creeks of the Island. Accumulations of sand usually form beds through which the sweet water slowly mingles with the salt, bu...

Free alike from the clatter of pastimes and the creaks and groans of labour, this region discovers acute sensibility to sound. Silence in its rarest phases soothes the Isle, rep...

A gaunt old man with grizzled head, shrunk shanks, and a crooked arm was the most timid of the strange mob of blacks who, under the guidance of some semi-civilised friends, visi...

For a week the wet monsoon had frolicked insolently along the coast, the intermittent north-east breeze, pert of promise but flabby of performance, giving way to evening calms....

Light-hearted, purely ornamental insects, sober and industrious, ugly, mischievous, destructive, all have revelled--and the butterfly brings the art of inconsequent revelling to...

With logic as absolute as that of the grape that can "the two-and-twenty jarring sects confute," Nature sets at naught the most ancient of axioms. How obvious is it that the les...

As I lounged at mine ease on the veranda, serenely content with the pages of a favourite author, I became conscious of an unusual sound-vague, continuous, rhythmic. Disinclined...