And so I went up to Brisbane. My friend, Jim Banfield, who was supposed to be coming with me, didn’t make it but joined me later. And I then went to the Lamington Forest which, again, is not well-known here, but that is an extraordinary forest. The border at that place, between New South Wales and Queensland is a cliff, and on the top of this cliff is the forest, and it is impenetrable rainforest, and in amongst that is the Antarctic beech forest. As you may know, Antarctica was once in the tropics, if we can put it that way, there are huge beech forests which are now coal seams in Antarctic, but the living trees, beech trees, are in the Lamington Park, in the Lamington forest.

And that is the place to go if you want to walk, it just abounds in little waterfalls, pools, little lakelets, you know, just an acre or so, surrounded by woods, parakeets, galahs, all sorts of coloured birds flying around. Abounding in snakes, I have to say, I killed 13 tiger snakes, just in one afternoon’s walk, by just dropping stones on them; by and large, they just get away from you. But that was real hiking, and we went from one place to another, from O’Reilly’s, which was an iconic name in Australia also, because he had found, through sheer bush craft, a plane which had come down and crashed, and some of the people had perished. It was a small plane, but the pilot and two others were found, and he found them by going through the bush and following signs, he’d seen a bit of smoke go up. So, I stayed at O’Reilly’s, well, they called it a guesthouse, but it was really their farmhouse. Then coming back, I saw other things, and hitchhiked again, stayed with various people, picked up with my friend. It was a good way to learn about Australia in those days.