This is the story of Fred Eden, an English traveller who arrived in Sydney in 1889. He lived in Australia for the next twenty-five years, much of this time being spent walking around Eastern Australia, South Australia and Tasmania. In the early 1900s he settled down in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

His extensive travels and keen observations of the Australian scene were recorded in detail in diary form. Although most of these journals have been lost, the handful remaining permit a fascinating insight into the accomplishments of an obsessive walker and into the memoirs of an encyclopedic observer.