precipitated me into the late Boer war, where I served my country in the Field Intelligence Department and afterwards drifted into the Native Constabulary. No doubt my experience in the South African Police has been of much service to me in my recent ride, for in the course of three years there, I covered twenty thousand miles on horseback, besides crossing the great Karoo on a bicycle.
Returning to Melbourne I settled down for a time to any profession of lithographic artist, until once more the nomad in me got the upper hand and I essayed a bicycle ride right across Australia, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific—but that is another story, as Rudyard Kipling would say.
Since the Immigration Movement, the Defence of Australia, and the Peopling of the Northern Territory became live questions, the thought had often occurred to me that it would be a good thing if someone would bring the matter down to a practical basis by exploring the districts under discussion, and finding out the possibilities of planting a white population in the northern lands that lay between us and those Asiatic hordes who might at any moment swarm across the Torres Straits and invade our unguarded shores. So, after a time, I arrived at the conclusion that, partly by
