31. I had to make a little speech at the Mossman Club, during the interval for tea, and have a nice little badge attesting to my membership. Sunday, 14 March 1948. Van got four or five specimens in his traps again this morning and was busy most of the day skinning them. As a result Harold Land and I went up the mountain alone. There is an enormous sheer cliff, perhaps about seven or eight hundred feet in height which forms the summit of the mountain on whose side we are camped. Nobody, Lane tells me, has yet reached the base of that cliff and I can well understand it. The scrub we passed through for two hours this afternoon was dense and hard to penetrate even though there was an old blazed trail which we followed. The cliff is about seven miles away and offers a challenge which I, for one, will ignore completely. On our visit to the swimming hole we found it populated with children from the Abbo Mission between us and Mossman. Lane had a pair of swimming trunks so he was alright; Van dived in with his shorts on and found them around his knees when he came up. I went away somewhere else and found a nice, bath- shaped pool hidden behind a boulder where I could soap myself and rest with my feet up at one end of my bath. Thompson, Lane's assistant, whose evening it was to come up and look over the power plant, tells me that S.S. Time is reported as having left Bowen for Townsville. The next stop will be Cairns and I doubt if we shall be here after Wednesday though I don't know the distance between Bowen and Townsville or Townsville and Cairns. Monday, 15 March 1948. The morning was much as usual and there is little to say about it. Van is having poor luck with his collecting and I dabble around, not knowing whether I am doing well or not, nor if what I got is of any value. We had a very enjoyable and much needed bath and swim at Noon and dur- ing the morning I washed my shirt. Len called from Cairns just before we re- turned from our swim to say that he would be coming out in the evening. Gil Bates drove him but we have not yet had a chance to discuss plans for our future. S.S. Time either is in Townsville or on her way, she has left Bowen anyway, and I suppose we shall probably return to Cairns about Thursday. A heavy storm developed about 8.30 P.M. and is going on now; the river will not be passable tomorrow, but there is no need to pass it anyway. Len brought up another tent with him, fortunately, but has not yet erected it. Our camp is in a cleared garden and will be somewhat muddy. The three cats are huddled together in what shelter they can find but I have no doubt that the toads are enjoying themselves thoroughly. George is somewhere to the south and east of us at a place called Devil-Devil Creek. His original plan of circling around and joining us here at Mossman is off, but I have not heard what plan has been substituted. However, it is good to know that we are approaching the last obstacle, the arrival of the ship and the re-packing, before we start on the job we came to do. Tomorrow evening Gil Bates and Art Taylor, the man who sponsored my membership in the Mossman Bowling Club, will probably come up for a while in the evening, making a bit of a change and the camp a little livelier. I shall not be sorry to return to Cairns; this is the half-way sort of thing that I dislike so much. The real job, in the real scrub, gives one more of a feeling of accomplishment.