In 1920, though, as the three ex-diggers talked across the bar at the West Coast, swapping stories of the War and goings-on in Cooktown and along the coast, the pioneer vision would have still been fresh and sustained by hope and dreams. All that was needed was a little luck – which might come from the Chinese gambling den across the way, or at the races, or a tip on a ‘sure thing’, be it trepang, trochus, timber or the treasures of the earth. So that day Idriess signed up for a sure thing with George Tritton – or perhaps not such a sure thing; Dick Welsh, Idriess’s best mate, chose not to go. Even so, a few days later Jack (Idriess’s frontier name) and George set sail for Howick Island. Before the end of the decade Idriess had renamed both the Island and his companion – he wrote that he had gone to Madman’s Island with his mate, Charlie. Madman’s Island; Idriess as character and author – fact or fiction. Fifty books later the seam he struck after returning from the War was mined out. There was nothing left that could be said about frontier life as Idriess saw and said it. It required and still needs to be understood from other perspectives. But Ion Idriess – as Jack Idriess along the Bloomfield, in the Tablelands back of Cairns, and along the coast of north Queensland – gives us a participant’s view. It’s a voice we should attend to – it’s our voice from a fading past.
