This photo journal documents two cycling holidays taken by Philip Walter Pears, a Queensland Police Magistrate and keen cyclist. On both occasions Pears left Warwick by mail train. The first holiday was spent with a friend, Mr. C Newcombe, cycling through the New England area, down to Port Macquarie and returning to Queensland via the Coast. The second trip was spent mostly in the New England with a brief time at Wauchope and Kempsey.

The album contains over 100 photographs with only one missing, that of Pear’s bicycle! Each photograph has a typed caption and on each page are separately typed stories or narratives. Photographs, captions and stories have been glued into place.

Of his stay in Port Macquarie Pears wrote ’… got rooms at a Hotel right on the bank of the channel so that I was able to photo the ships as they passed at breakfast time…. while Newcombe provided fish for our meals I visited the various places of interest. There are many old graves of early settlers in the Cemetery but as it has been let as a run for cattle many of them are destroyed. The church is like an old English village church with the old high pew.The tower is peculiar as it is square outside & round inside’

Ironically, P. W. Pears died as the result of a cycling accident near his Newmarket home in Brisbane on 13 April 1924 at the age of 77 years.