Jan. 11 to 15: On a visit to Crows Nest to see folks of my family. Travel by rail to Toowoomba, rail motor to Crows Nest. Country wonderfully lush and green after one of the best seasons in years. Grass thick and soft. Young corn flourishing; alfalfa being cut for hay; farmers troubled by weeds in their fields. This country was drought stricken [illegible] farmers troubled by weeds in their fields a year ago. The cattle (mostly dairy cattle in these parts) ate up all the old grass, hence the soft new grass, now shin to knee high. Many cattle died in the drought. The present summer season is extraordinarily good all over Queensland, with the exception of a patch of grazing country in the north west. The Crows Nest district has changed greatly since my boyhood years. Farming has ruined the country except for farmers, who are prosperous enough and modernizing their equipment as fast as the things they want come on the market. Every farmer now seems to use milking machinery. Electric light plants are being installed. Kerosene-burning refrigerators now common. Great demand for trucks and cars. English car makers making a bid for the market; saw only American trucks. Farmers getting 2/- per pound for butter fat - highest price ever. Fat pigs bring up to ten and eleven pounds. Grain prices high, but in this district most grain is used for fattening pigs on the farms. The fine tall Eucalyptus forests have disappeared but for a patch here and there on poor stony land. Some land still in the grey ghost stage of dead trees standing in the paddocks; other land pretty well cleared of dead timber but for the great stumps of the trees, which will outlast another generation of farmers. Only small patches of "scrub bushes", and an occasional hoop vine or bunya pine, show where the fine tall rain-forests once stood. Most of the rich wild life has gone with the timber. Walla- bies and bandicoots, and possums, are still here, but the common mammals are English hares and foxes. The surviving possums live in the hollows of dead trees and raid the farmer's corn and the orange trees in his garden. Most of the forest birds have gone. White cockatoos no longer steal the ripening corn; few laughing jackasses survive. The only country that has not changed much is on the eastern scarp of the Main Ridge Range, where rough sandstone and granite replace the volcanic rocks which produced the rich farm soils. Friday Jan. 16: Back on the job. Collected mails at the Museum and Gardens. Looked through a collection of herbarium specimens made by Freddie Whitehouse at Arakun, on the west cost of Cape York Peninsula, last year. Mostly poor scraps, but they throw interest- ing light on the flora. Indication of a dry type of closed vegetation of rain-forest species (Pterocarpus, Mimops, Buchanania, Syzygium, Capparidaceae, Delabria, etc), besides savanna country. A collection of about 1000 numbers of scrappy material col- lected by Whitehouse on his military reconnaissance in 1942 was determined by Francis and incorporated in the Herbarium without listing of the names or publication of a report. White says the collection contained a cumber of new records for Australia. It is high time that real work was done on the C. Y. flora. Called on Mr. Arthur Bell, new Under Secretary of the Dept. of Agriculture & Stock to get advance information as to how we will stand re permits to export zoological col- lections when the time comes to ship them home. Our permit to collect "fauna" does not cover this. Very successful interview. Subject to Commonwealth laws or regula- tions governing export of specimens and quarantine clearance on behalf of country of destination, our Queensland permit to export will be in conformity with our collecting permit. The Collector of Customs (Commonwealth) has already assured me that his de- partment will OK anything sanctioned by the Queensland authorities. Which means we can collect and export collections of "fauna" without restriction. The Queensland Govt. will waive their right under the Protection Act to charge royalty on skins col- lected. I will be granted an open permit to collect the considerable list of protected