The Confessions of a BeachcomberBanfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
History
The Confessions of a Beachcomber
Banfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
Dunk Island (Qld.); Natural history -- Australia -- Queensland
The plateau is the park of the island, half a mile broad, and a mile and
more long. Upon it grows the best of the bloodwoods (EUCALYPTUS
CORYNBOSA), the red stringy bark (E. ROBUSTA), Moreton Bay ash (E.
TESSALARIS), various wattles, the gin-gee of the blacks (DIPLANTHERA
TETRAPHYLLA). PANDANUS AQUATICUS marks the courses and curves of some of
the gullies. A creek, hidden in a broad ribbon of jungle and running from
a ravine in the range to the sea, divides our park in fairly equal
portions.
Most part of the range is heavily draped with jungle--that is, on the
western aspect. Just above the splash of the Pacific surges on the
weather or eastern side, low-growing scrub and restricted areas of
forest, with expansive patches of jungle, plentifully intermixed with
palms and bananas, creep up the precipitous ascent to the summit of the
range--870 feet above the sea. So steep is the Pacific slope that,
standing on the top of the ridge and looking down, you catch mosaic
gleams of the sea among the brown and grey tree-trunks. But for the
prodigality of the vegetation, one slide might take you from the cool
mountain-top to the cooler sea. The highest peak, which presents a
buttressed face to the north, and overlooks our peaceful bay, is crowned
with a forest of bloodwoods, upon which the jungle steadily encroaches.
The swaying fronds of aspiring palms, adorned in due season with masses
of straw-coloured inflorescence, to be succeeded by loose bunches of red,
bead-like berries, shoot out from the pall of leafage. In the gloomy
gullies are slender-shafted palms and tree-ferns, while ferns and mosses
cover the soil with living tapestry, and strange, snake-like epiphytes
cling in sinuous curves to the larger trees. The trail of the lawyer vine
(CALAMUS OBSTRUENS), with its leaf sheath and long tentacles bristling
with incurved hooks, is over it all. Huge cables of vines trail from tree
to tree, hanging in loops and knots and festoons, the largest (ENTADA
SCANDENS) bearing pods 4 feet long and 4 inches broad, containing a dozen
or so brown hard beans used for match-boxes. Along the edge of the
jungle, the climbing fern (LYNGODIUM) grows in tangled masses sending its
slender wire-like lengths up among the trees--the most attractive of all
the ferns, and glorified by some with the title of "the Fern of God," so
surpassing its grace and beauty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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