Career
Banfield had experience with newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1870s, and in 1882 went to Townsville, Queensland, where he became sub-editor of the Townsville Bulletin. In 1884 he visited England, the voyage providing the material for a pamphlet, The Torres Strait Route from Queensland to England (1885).
While in England, Banfield met his future wife, they were married at Townsville in 1886. Banfield remained at the Townsville Bulletin until 1897 until he resigned, being diagnosed with tuberculosis and in a state of nervous collapse. Banfield and his deaf wife then settled on Dunk Island off the North Queensland coast. With his health improving, he obtained a 30-year lease of 129 ha (320 acres) of land on Dunk Island on 4 January 1900 and lived 23 more years of a comparatively solitary life. A house was constructed, fruit-trees and vegetables were planted; goats and cattle provided them with milk, butter and occasionally meat, and there were abundant fish in the surrounding seas. Most importantly there were the immense possibilities of the nature study which made up so much of the charm of his books. For nine months in 1901, Banfield took the place of a former colleague at Townsville who was travelling abroad. Except for occasional short holidays on the mainland, he spent the rest of his days on the island. In 1907 he wrote a tourists' guide for the Queensland government, Within the Barrier, and in 1908 appeared his Confessions of a Beachcomber which immediately gave him a place of his own among Australian writers. This was followed by My Tropic Isle (1911), and Tropic Days (1918). His Last Leaves from Dunk Island was published posthumously in 1925.
The title of Banfield's first serious book,Confessions of a Beachcomber, was misleading; he was no mere collector of trifling tales. Its suggestion came from the breaking up of a wreck on the coast many miles away which resulted in much debris drifting to the island. He worked hard on his plantation, and in its early days he found that work on a tropic island had its own difficulties. Once these were overcome he could get enough leisure to study the vegetable, bird and sea life of the island, and, the Aborigines before they were taken away and placed on a reservation. Visitors came and were made welcome by Banfield and his wife.
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