Written by Arthur Bicknell and published in 1895, the book describes the time he spent in Northern Queensland during the early 1890s. He was 'persuaded by friends who are better acquainted with the literary world than [him]self to write an account of [his] travels in a country so little known to the ordinary traveller as Northern Queensland'.
The book covers the journey to Australia via Java and the Torres Strait. He describes his travels and adventures through much of north Queensland – Port Douglas Range, Herberton, Mount Albion, the Einasleigh River, the Etheridge goldfield, Castletown, Curham, Gilbert River, Port Douglas, the Sandy and Rocky Tate Rivers, and Charters Towers.
'CASTLETOWN is a small mining camp standing at an elevation of 700 feet above the sea level; there are about a dozen houses, a pub, and, of, course, a Chinaman's garden ... Unfortunately gold mining in this district is not very successful; free gold is found near the surface in what is termed ' brown stone,' but when a depth of 100 feet is reached the ore becomes heavily charged with pyrites, and is most refractory and difficult to treat, and at a depth of about 200 feet the lodes seem to cut out.
It includes numerous illustrations by J B Clark made from sketches done by the author. The CD contains high quality scanned images of the original book, and has been bookmarked for easy navigation. Pages can be searched, browsed, enlarged and printed out if required.
Click here to download a file of sample pages from this book
Right click on the link and select "save as" - to a location on your hard drive. The sampler can be opened, navigated and searched as with the full CD file/s.
Sample files usually contain the title page, contents, some introductory pages and sample pages from the body of the book. Often the complete index from the original book is included.
