I Recall: Collections and Recollections

Book excerpt: I Recall: Collections and Recollections is a memoir by Robert Henderson Croll. Croll was an Australian author, lyricist, bushwalker, and civic servant. Excerpt: "Central Australia, where I have now been five times, was long a place of desire. When my Sister Elizabeth and her husband, Albert Watts, went to live at Quorn, a township sitting at the foot of the Flinders Range in South Australia, I paid her two visits. They quickened my wish to see more of the remarkable country on the edge of which Quorn is placed. That was some forty years ago. The first, a Spring journey, left two vivid memories. One is of the seemingly endless fields of young wheat which made much of South Australia so beautiful just then; the other is of a shooting trip to which we were invited. Our hosts were two young men of the district, tall and powerful, sons of a German settler. The conveyance was a light open cart with one fixed seat which held the two brothers. Behind them, a board rested its ends on the sides of the cart and was secured to the front seat by a stout rope."