[citation needed] While in England, Banfield met his future wife, Bertha Golding, and they were married at Townsville in 1886.

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.

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.

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.

[citation needed] Banfield described Dunk Island as his "Isle of Dreams—this unkempt, unrestrained garden where the centuries gaze upon perpetual summer".