25. Wednesday, 3 March 1948. Heavy rain which started yesterday afternoon, beat on the corrugated iron roofs and balconies of the hotel, and still, this morning, there is a slight fall, which expands into heavy showers every so often. The atmosphere is steamy and humid and as I write, my fingers sweat and the drops slide down my forearms and drip from my elbows. George and Van left at 7.30 this morning, George going to Chillagoe, to the bat caves there, for a day, and Van to a place called Suttee Gap. Both will take up residence with road-making gangs during their stay at their respective posts. Len spent the morning at the experimental agricultural station at Mareeba which Gil Bates is to take over, while I continued working on the books and organization. We are planning a rearrangement of our sup- plies but will have to plot it out before the arrival, if any, of S.S. Time. Thus far I have run against no Somerset Maugham characters although otherwise the setting is appropriate. The brothel system is accepted in Queensland, as in France, with bi-weekly 6 inspections but in Cairns the street which used to house them has been cleaned up and there no longer is any red lamp district. A grizzly-bearded, parchment-faced old gent who lives in the hotel turns out to be one of Queensland's leading jurists in the past, the various men whom we meet and beer with are mostly in some form of government employ, in agricultural, road-making, or experimental departments. Shorts or white linen clothes are the usual thing, with the women wearing printed cotton with a minimum of chic both in the design and in the wearing. At Hides Hotel, the male guests are expected to wear coats for all meals and ties also for dinner. With such a climate it seems to me that even the Old School can be duly upheld with some less constricting garment than a tie. However, when we final- ly leave here, all that will be a thing of the past. The only settlement of any size, Cooktown, which we may touch on the last leg of the trip, was once quite a flourishing place when the Palmer gold fields were newly discovered, but now it has dwindled to less than a couple of hundred population, most of whom are over seventy. During Len's recce trip, while he was at Thursday Island, he told me of an evening at the hotel there, which was run by a woman. She got drunk, fell and split her head and when Len came down next morning he found a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs and a little puppy, with both feet in it, bustily lapping it up. The hotel woman took a day off and the following day appeared wearing a turban. The delay we are experiencing here is annoying in many ways. In order to do any collecting locally it is necessary to purchase many things of which we have large stores in S.S. Time; even apart from that, while collecting of anything is better than nothing, it still is not what we came for. Then also money, which could be much more profitably spent on other things, is being used for hotel bills and living expenses, when we expected to live on our own supplies and in our own tents. However, it is not to be expected that any expedition can be run without any hitch and certainly this is not a result of any culpability on our part. But one cannot tell what is being done about the strike and the reports are quite conflicting - one source says it is ending and another states that more and other trades will be go- ing almost any minute. This morning's papers say that PERHAPS the strikers will allow Time to proceed from Mackay, where she has been since last Friday, but a shortage of bread in Cairns is developing and soon there will be acute need, if not starvation, in many smaller and less accessible places. The announcement by the Queensland Government of a state of emergency, seems to have made no difference whatever.