For bringing us from RIP, carting firewood, etc., Holland has asked £7/10/-; which is very reasonable. He has given us a 12 x 12 shack for cookhouse, and built a skillion onto it for a dining place; installed a stove for the cook; laid on water from the spring; made us a shower room, and installed a pit latrine. I expected nothing quite so hospitable when I decided to base at Lockerbie. Joe the cook gets £9 per week for full services every day, plus food. Wages in Australia are much higher than pre-war, and the recent application of the 40 hour week to all jobs has been a boon to employ- ees such as cooks. Work on Saturdays and Sundays calls for payment of time and a half. Basic weekly pay for a bush cook in this area (No. 10 zone) is £7/10/-, plus fourpence a day bush allowance! Thursday April 22 My first day in the field on Cape York yielded me 137 sheets of 21 app. for about 2½ hours actually spent in the field. Collected on a wet teatree (Melaleuca) flat about 3/4 mile SW of camp. Grey podsolized sand generally two or three inches under peat-stained water, with here and there a raised bit of ground a few feet across and an inch or two above water. Ground cover generally of sedges, of which I gathered 8 species. Restionaceae No. 18352, with very hairy rudimentary leaves on its young stems only, was abundant in parts, as was a small Eriocaulon (18356). Commonest of a thin stand of trees were Melaleuca Leucadendron vel aff. 18350 (15-20 m. tall), M. symphyocarpa (18351) with rough bark and drooping branches, and Banksia integrifolia (18366), up to 6 or 7 m high. My boy Robert has made a good start. Very observant and quick to learn, though not noticeably enthusiastic about such things as sedges. Sedges are just undurra (grasses) to Robert. He knows the native names for practically all the savanna-forest trees, and many smaller plants. Is modest about his knowledge, saying that the old men of the tribe know more than he. His tribe has been brought from the McDonnell country to settle at the Cowal Creek Mission. According to Holland, the last of the Cape York (Somerset) blacks died 20 to 30 years ago. Between them the two mammal boys trapped one Melomys last night. Out jacking with young Dick Holland, Van shot a spotted cuscus and anothe Melomys. This evening the mammal dept. has out 75 rat traps and a few steels. Friday April 23 Most of my morning spent on a reconnaissance trip with Dick senior. Visited the sawmill, property of Tom Holland, about 3 miles from Locker- bie along the Somerset track, in a small savanna-forest pocket within the "Big Scrub." Dick had to go there to pick up his daughter, Pearl, who has been minding the two small children of Tom, whose wife is at T.I., having another baby. Tom has cut a clearing of about 3 acres in the rain forest and built a house in it. Around the edges of this clear- ing one gets the most impressive view of the rain forest. Big trees and numerous slender palms, both feather leaved and fanleaved. We followed the old Somerset track for about 1/2 mile into the rain-forest; the route running close to a branch of the Laradenya Creek most of the way. The rain forest carries a rather scattered stand of fairly big trees, many trees of second magnitude, and a rather open woody undergrowth. Herbaceous plants practically absent. Few epiphytes seen. Very few lianas. Only a tinge of green moss on some of the trees, and on sharp blocks of lateritic ironstone outcropping here and there. A slender