14 APRIL 1928, Page 19

If the reader can steel himself against quantities of ecstatic

and profuse- verbiage (like "the local atmosphere whirled and roared under the cyclonic influence of the fire-fiend ") he will find in Adventures in the Big Bush In the Haunts of the Aboriginal, by Mr. Cyril Grant Lane (Hutchinson, 188.), much description of black-fellows and natural history in the little-known country of North Queensland that lies round the Gulf of Carpentaria. Numbers of strange things " transpire " in that region, and the illustrations of some of them that appear in this book are certainly interesting; of Corroborees, for instance, which "apostrophize the hushful, star-lit wilds With sounds so extraordinary as to well-nigh baffle description."

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