153. Sunday, 3 October 1948. The daily entry in this journal is now a thing of the past and I can find other methods of learning what day it may be. It seems to me that a detailed recital of my packing and evacuation from Cooktown would be most heartily boring to all readers and to me in particular. I shall simply state the final disposal of us all and will be doing Museum work for a couple of weeks before flying back; he leaves from Sydney about November 1st, I think. Len has gone down to Brisbane, left this morning and will spend the rest of the time with his people. Van leaves on Tuesday by the Wandana and will take the freight along with him and I go by train to Brisbane on Wednesday, catch a train to Sydney an hour or so after reaching Brisbane, and shall return from Sydney on the 13th. After that all we have to do is get our tax clearances, load ourselves on board the ship and wait until we reach Boston or wherever we are going. It seems that quite unwittingly I caused something of a sensation a cou- ple of days ago. I was deep in packing and had about all my specimens wrapped and away when Ernie Stevens brought in a large fat snake, of a kind which I had not previously had and could not identify. There was just space enough in one of my containers for his skin, and as he was about seven feet long and had already been twenty-four hours dead, he had to be skinned. I was wearing trousers only and quite unthinkingly I spread out my snake along the sidewalk and began to remove the skin. Soon Ernie told me that I had an audience and looking around I saw that all the people walking along had circled around me to the other side of the street and stood there watching me drag the grey and brown skin away from the pallid insides. One just does not skin snakes on a Cairns main street. Last night I was with our refugee friends again and have developed a fondness for them; they are busy making all sorts of optimistic plans for running a cattle station, combined with kangaroo and dingo hunting and mineral operating on the side. They are also considering taking educational movies and have mapped an almost impossible future for themselves. The mother of the girl, Mrs. Puddicomb, has just bought herself a houseboat which is moored in front of the Strand Hotel. She said she was tired of paying hotel bills but usually finds herself cut off from the houseboat by a stretch of deep mud when she comes home at night, and goes and takes a room at the Strand any- way. The mud really is deep too; there is a story of a man who offered to carry her out to the boat - he went in waist deep at the first step under their combined weight and I am not sure if he was ever recovered after he took the second step. Alex Frodsham, the boy who is engaged to Joan Puddicomb, (the party having consisted of Joan, Alex and his brother, Peter) managed to get himself into some trouble by swiping ten gallons of 80 octane gas somewhere. It was the use of that gasoline that blew the gasket on their boat and caused all the trouble. Anyway Alex was picked up by a Cairns detective, fingerprinted, had his teeth measured and was charged 30/-. He and the detective are going fishing together this afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Dupain were also in last night and Willie D. went down to Brisbane by the same plane as Len. Most of our social obligations have been consummated now, we get the freight to the dock tomorrow, pay the bills on Tuesday, and that is that. Monday, October 4, 1948. That isn't that. A telegram came in from Len this afternoon saying that the sailing from Brisbane had been changed from the 15th to the 20th, which gives me another four or five days to kill somehow - at the moment I don't know where or how I shall spend them.