Banfield Memorial Reserve and Grave | |
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![]() Banfield Memorial Reserve and Grave, 2008
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Location | Dunk Island, Cassowary Coast Region, Queensland, Australia |
Coordinates | 17°56′08″S 146°08′40″E / 17.9355°S 146.1444°ECoordinates: 17°56′08″S 146°08′40″E / 17.9355°S 146.1444°E |
Built | 1923-1933 |
Official name: Banfield Memorial Reserve and Grave | |
Type | state heritage (built) |
Designated | 6 August 2010 |
Reference no. | 602755 |
Banfield Memorial Reserve and Grave is a heritage-listed lone grave at Dunk Island, Cassowary Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1923 to 1933. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 6 August 2010.
Situated on Dunk Island in far north Queensland, the grave was made in 1923 for the remains of the renowned author and naturalist, Edmund James (Ted) Banfield. The cairn erected over it soon after and the memorial reserve established around it in 1971, honour the man popularly known as "The Beachcomber" for his set of internationally successful books about its native flora and fauna. In the early twentieth century Banfield made a significant contribution to the conservation of not only Dunk Island but the entire Family Islands group situated off the coast from Mission Beach, of which it is a part, as well as popularising a particular kind of tourism in this part of the Great Barrier Reef that would later be termed eco-tourism.
Edmund (Ted) James Banfield was born on 4 September 1852 in Liverpool, England. His family emigrated to Australia in 1858 after his father found a job printing a news-sheet on the Ararat goldfields in Victoria. Ted Banfield eventually followed his father into journalism, but his particular passions were the study of nature and reading. He was strongly influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), an American philosopher, essayist and poet whose most famous book was Walden or Life in the Woods published in 1854 and whose best known essay was On the Duty of Civil Disobedience first published in 1849. Thoreau became well known for his ideas about living close to nature and developing self-reliance within it, as well as those pertaining to the deficiencies of state power. Banfield later credited his reading of Thoreau's work with giving him the impetus to search out new experiences.