Queensland Bush Book Club, Annual Report, 1936

I have to thank you for the wonderful holiday. I haven’t been away for many years but I travelled far and wide with the last parcel. The perfect holiday they say combines escape inwards with escape outwards but when the latter is not forthcoming, it is still possible to obtain the escape inwards - for a member of the Bush Book Club anyway.

I have had the most entrancing holiday, visiting Java with Winifred Ponder. I have been admitted to Farthing Hall and watched the development of a romantic love story and enjoyed the domestic difference of two very likeable people. I have joined Lord Peter Whimsey in his pursuit of the murderer in The Crime at Bellona Club and positively swaggered up and down the Spanish Main in the wake of Captain Blood. Now I am going back to my mending and banking and cleaning with heaps of new friends and much to think about and many incidents to laugh over. It’s a wonderful thing to laugh. Such a pity that one so soon forgets the trick of it surrounded by miles of parched brownness and dazzled by heat haze, with the dreary knowledge in the background of dying cattle and overworked men-folk — But I feel ever so refreshed with new things to think and talk about.

Queensland Bush Book Club, Annual Report, 1936