The Confessions of a Beachcomber
Abstract
This paper was read at the Seminar on North Queensland Writing held by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (Townsville), August 2-3. 1980.
The title page of E.J. Banfield's The Confessions of a Beachcomber bears this quotation from Thoreau:
If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.
We have it on the authority of the naturalist Charles Barrett1 that this was Banfield's favourite quotation from the American writer. Indeed, the range and number of his quotations from Thoreau's books suggest that the lord of Dunk Isle had a deeply familiar admiration for the hermit of Concord.
References
Charles Barrett, Koonwarra: A Naturalist's Adventures in Australia (Oxford University Press, 1938), P. 168. All future page references to Koonwarra are from this edition, and are incorporated in the text.
E.J. Banfield, My Tropic Isle (London: Unwin, 1911). All page references
to My Tropic Isle are from this edition, and are incorporated in the
text.
E.J. Banfield, The Confessions of a Beachcomber, with an Introduction
by Alec H. Chishoim, rev. Australian edition (Sydney: Angus and
Robertson, 1968). All future page references to The Confessions are
from this edition, and are incorporated in the text.
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