Excerpt from In Australian Wilds: The Gleanings of a Naturalist

First met the author of this book as one of a band of young enthusiasts calling themselves The Woodlanders, living their week-ends and holidays in a bark hut at Olinda, and hunting wild things very keenly and successfully with a camera; quite content to live close to Nature and to study it without collecting it. Most boys begin an intimate friendship with Nature as collectors, but if the author of this book ever had that failing it was before I met him, and that is so very long ago that there is no need to embarrass either of us over so small a matter of dates. In the social intercourse of the human race the character reader is often of more consequence than the anatomist - though each may follow his bent with out necessarily belittling the researches of the other. Mr. Barrett's standpoint to Nature has ever been a friendly, even a loving one, full of quiet but deep sentiment, which in his younger days he would have been slow to acknowledge, because we all like to be little our own emotions. It is one of the very widest of our unconvincing fictions. His soft side for Nature was backed by courage and conviction, and where the protection of wild things was concerned no one amongst all the naturalists I have known was so quick to recognize his duty in suppressing and pre venting wrong, and to do it without any regard at all for personal consequences or convenience, recalling in this something of the Kipling line, Oh beware my country, when my country grows polite. His sense of duty, while finding very quiet expression, was con spicuously strong - it was that same sense of duty which induced him, when he had already given hostages to fortune, to put aside all thoughts of per sonal comfort and preferment and throw in his lot with the army that never was broken.

Mr. Barrett has in late years seen and studied strange phases of Nature in other lands - in Egypt, in Sinai, in Palestine - where one may still check his impressions by reference to the first book of Nature. And at the end of it he has come back, not to tell us of war, either in its romance or its realities, but to drop quietly into the old haunts and seclusions and give us in his first published words just the old hobby and the old home things. The one thing which all his old friends and admirers would have wished is that everyone who takes up this book could know the author of it as we do. It would have added much to their enjoyment and understanding of his work. He is a tireless, even a daring hunter, without the hunter's limitations in daring most only for the things that are good to kill and to eat.

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