A Walden for Australia in the early 1900s perhaps? Nah, not that great, but a peaceful read. ( )

E J Banfield left work as a journalist at 46 and set up a subsistence existence with his wife on Dunk Island in the first few years of the 1900s. This book is a collection of short essays about the wildlife of the island, the local aboriginal population and a little (very little) about himself. He is more amateur naturalist than philosophy, so although there are parallels with Thoreau, there are also major differences.
Banfield may have been a journalist, but he is no great wordsmith - sentence structure is often unwieldy, and the text rarely flows easily. But the nature of the writer shines through - he loved his life on Dunk Island and loved the nature around him.
There is a section on the local aboriginal people in the second part of the book, and although Banfield subscribes to the views of his era (easing the passing of a dying race) he shows genuine interest in the people he gets to know, and has the capacity to see them as individuals, and there seems to be genuine empathy between them.
Read March 2015 ( )