The farmer's first consideration is how he may utilise his land to the

best advantage. The most profitable crops are those for which there

is a world-wide demand but only a limited area of production, and

therefore little competition for the grower; or, alternatively, crops

which, by reason of natural advantages, he can produce more abundantly

and at less cost than his competitors. Next in value are crops for

which he has a monopoly in a limited but protected market, or enjoys

natural advantages which give him a partial monopoly in such a market.

Of less value, but still profitable, are crops which he can place on

the market as cheaply as his rivals.

In the first-mentioned category the Queensland farmer has butter,

cheese, hams, and bacon. With good stock, cheap land, unrivalled

pastures, and a climate which permits production to go on

uninterruptedly from January to December, Queensland is most

favourably situated, and farmers have not been slow to profit by their

natural advantages.

Large as are the present dimensions of the dairying industry, they are

small compared with the possibilities of expansion. Already the value

of butter, cheese, and milk is well over L1,000,000 per annum, the

butter export alone being worth considerably more than half that

sum. The export has multiplied tenfold in the last six years; and, as

Queensland is the leading cattle State, there is every justification

for believing that in dairy produce she will soon become one of the

principal exporting States of the Commonwealth.

[Illustration: SURPRISE CREEK CASCADE, CAIRNS RAILWAY]

So late as twenty years ago, much of the butter consumed in Queensland

came from the Southern States. The local product was inferior in

quality, although an agreeable change from the imported salted butter.

The passage of the protective tariff of 1888 gave a great impetus

to the production of butter and cheese. A heavy impost was placed on

dairy produce, and the Government lent further aid to the industry by

sending experts through the farming districts in charge of travelling

dairies. Valuable instruction was given; the cream separator came

into general use, and there was soon a noticeable improvement in

both butter and cheese. Factories sprang into existence in every

agricultural centre, and by degrees the farmers became suppliers of

cream instead of manufacturers of butter. Speedily production overtook

the local consumption, importations ceased, and manufacturers began

to look oversea for a market for their surplus stocks. Difficulties

at once arose in connection with refrigerated space and freight rates.

Regular shipments and rapid transport involved transhipment at

Sydney from the coastal steamers, increased expense, and risk of

deterioration. A State subsidy induced first one and then another

shipping company to make Brisbane its terminal port in Australia, and

to provide refrigerated chambers for butter at reduced freights; and

now Queensland, in respect of these matters, is on precisely the same

footing as the other States.

On the first appearance of Queensland butter in London, lower prices

were obtainable than were paid for other brands with an established

reputation, and some dissatisfaction was expressed by buyers on

account of variations in quality. To remedy this, legislation was

passed providing for Government inspection and grading of all butter

intended for export. Whether grading and price do or do not stand in

the relations of cause and effect, it is beyond dispute that it is

only since the initiation of the system that Queensland butter has

been on a parity with the butter of the Southern States and New

Zealand, and the general standard is undoubtedly higher than in

pre-grading days.

Coincident with the improvement in the quality of the butter, a great

change for the better has taken place in the dairy herds. Good milking

strains have been introduced, and more attention is paid to the

feeding of the cows, with the result that it is by no means uncommon

for the milk from one cow to bring as much as L8 or L9 a year.

The tariff of 1888 and the educative policy of successive Governments

have also been largely responsible for the establishment of the allied

industry of bacon and ham curing on a firm basis, and local brands are

favourably known in many parts of the world.

Under the heading of crops for which our farmers enjoy a monopoly in

a limited but protected market--or natural advantages which are

equivalent to a partial monopoly--are sugar, maize, tomatoes, tropical

and citrus fruits, and cigar tobacco. The Commonwealth tariff gives

Queensland a practical monopoly in Australia for sugar. She has a

virtual monopoly for tropical fruits, being the only State in which

these are produced in excess of local requirements. The warmer climate

and earlier crop give her temporary command of the Southern markets

for citrus fruits, tomatoes, maize, and a number of minor products,

before they mature in the cooler South, an advantage that will extend

in time to many other crops, with the increasing interchange arising

from interstate free trade.

Chief among products which can be placed as cheaply on the market as

in other countries are the cereals. Queensland has all the essentials

of a great grain-producing country. Her name does not yet figure

among the list of exporters of foodstuffs, but the reasons for her

backwardness are not far to seek.

At the close of 1908 the number of people in the State, scattered over

its 670,500 square miles of territory, was only 558,000--little more

than the population of Sydney or Melbourne, and less than that of

several second-class cities in the mother country. Probably not more

than ten per cent. of the people are engaged in farming, but, acre for

acre and man for man, Queensland compares favourably with countries

that are regarded as primarily agricultural. The lands most sought

after have been scrub, deep alluvial flats, and black and chocolate

loams; and, until recently, it was on land of this kind that most of

the wheat and barley was grown. Heavy crops were harvested, as a

rule, but the results were not uniformly satisfactory, and it is now

recognised that these highly fertile lands are better suited for other

forms of cultivation than the growth of cereals. For several years,

incoming selectors--many Southern wheat farmers from preference--have

been settling to the west of the heavy Downs country on the lighter

soils of ridge and plain. From these lands, of which Queensland has a

practically unlimited supply, but which the settlers of twenty or even

ten years ago regarded as poor, more and more of the wheat crop is now

coming. With less labour and at less expense than on the heavy soils,

the farmer has greater certainty of a payable yield.

Sugar has first place among agricultural products from Port Douglas

to the Mary River, followed by maize and the luscious fruits of the

tropics. From Maryborough to the Tweed, maize takes precedence of

sugar. Crops of less importance are potatoes, pumpkins, citrus fruits,

pineapples, and bananas. In the Central and Southern divisions of the

coastal belt, where dairying is the chief industry, large areas are

under fodder crops and permanent grasses. From the Northern section

of the littoral, thousands of bunches of bananas are shipped weekly

to the South. Mangoes and pineapples are also sent South in very

considerable quantities. Citrus fruits and tomatoes ripen at least

two months earlier in North Queensland than in New South Wales and

Victoria, and this fact has led to an important and profitable trade

in these commodities being opened up with Sydney and Melbourne. The

spices and food and other economic plants of the tropics grow to

perfection north of Mackay. Cigar tobacco of good quality is being

grown in small quantities in several parts of the North, and the

Commonwealth bounty and the willingness of manufacturers to take

the leaf should lead in time to the bulk of the cigars consumed

in Australia being made from Queensland leaf. Despite the heat and

humidity of the climate, dairying is being carried on with success as

far north as Cairns, and at Atherton on the hinterland it promises to

become an important industry.

Except on the Darling Downs, progress on the tableland has been

retarded until a comparatively recent date through the land being

locked up in pastoral leaseholds. At Atherton in the North and on

the Burnett lands in the South, however, agricultural settlement is

proceeding by leaps and bounds. Following the usual practice on scrub

land, maize and grasses are the principal objects of culture, as they

can be planted among the fallen timber and converted into milk long

before the land can be put under the plough.

The Darling Downs, famous for their beauty and fertility, well deserve

their title of "Garden of Queensland." Other districts, notably

Atherton and the Burnett, have as good land, and the latter may

have an equal area; but nowhere can there be seen 4,000,000 acres of

splendid agricultural country requiring so little labour to bring it

under cultivation. Far beyond the horizon stretch these fine lands,

formerly clothed with nutritious natural grasses, but now passing into

cultivation and dotted over with prosperous homesteads. More than 70

per cent. of the wheat, oats, and barley of Queensland comes from the

Downs, which are capable of supporting a population far larger than

the whole State now contains. Shipments of malting barley grown on

the Downs attracted such favourable notice in England a few years

back that offers were made to buy large quantities, and modern and

well-equipped malting houses have since been built at Toowoomba and

Warwick by a leading firm of English maltsters. Oats are grown for

hay, no grain being ground into meal. There is an increasing tendency,

founded on experience, to look to the lighter soils for cereal

production, and to put the heavier volcanic soils of the Eastern Downs

to uses for which they are better adapted. To dairying much of the

prosperity of the Downs farmers is due. Butter and cheese factories

have been erected every few miles along the railway line, and the

number of cream-cans awaiting transport on every platform bear

striking testimony to the importance of the industry. Most of the

fruits of Northern and Southern Europe flourish, and the many fine

orchards between Stanthorpe and the New South Wales border are giving

handsome returns to their fortunate owners. In the neighbourhood of

Texas, to the west of Warwick, pipe tobacco of fine flavour is being

cultivated. The extension of the railway from Warwick to Goondiwindi

has rendered available additional areas suitable for this crop, and

circumstances favour the creation of a great industry.

The boundless plains of the West, where the annual rainfall varies

from 30 inches to 10 inches, are the seat of the pastoral industry,

and agriculture is still in its infancy. In the vicinity of Roma, on

the Southern and Western Railway, wheat is the staple crop. Further

West, on river banks and adjacent to artesian bores, vegetables,

grapes, and oranges are grown. The oranges at Barcaldine, in the

Central West, have been pronounced by the Government Fruit Expert

to be the finest he has seen. In the same locality areas of grain,

lucerne, and other hay crops show the capabilities of the plain lands

when irrigated; but these small patches do not constitute an

industry. The soil has in it all the elements of fertility, and is

of inexhaustible depth; but, unhappily, the rainy season does not

coincide with the period of growth of the cereals for which these

lands seem otherwise intended by Nature; and until science becomes

the handmaid of husbandry, and irrigation is demonstrated to be both

practicable and remunerative, agriculture is likely to make little

headway in the West.

[Illustration: PINEAPPLE FARM, WOOMBYE, NORTH COAST RAILWAY]

[Illustration: SUGAR-MILL, HUXLEY, ISIS RAILWAY]

[Illustration: A FIELD OF MAIZE, EEL CREEK, GYMPIE]

The farmers of Queensland may well lay to heart the experience

of America. Forty years ago disaster overtook every attempt at

cultivation west of the Mississippi basin until the aid of irrigation

was invoked. The response to the application of water was immediate,

and millions of acres are now under intense cultivation in the dry

belt, and supporting a population far outnumbering that of Australia.

These are the words in which an American writer graphically describes

the wonderful work that has been done on lands that bear a striking

resemblance to those of Western Queensland both in regard to climate

and soil:--

The actual amount of land that may be reclaimed and cultivated

in the semi-arid region furnishes no measure of the value of

irrigation in this vast district. By enabling thousands to

engage in farming, irrigation has made it possible to use the

surrounding plains as the pasture for great numbers of beef

cattle. In many instances small herds are owned by the farmers

themselves, but to a large extent their crops are bought by

those whose sole business is cattle-raising. Thus all the

resources of the region are brought into use, and a wonderful

prosperity has followed as the logical result.

From Canada to Mexico the revolution of the Great Plain is now

in full tide. It is the most democratic page in the history

of American irrigation. It has saved an enormous district from

lapsing into a condition of semi-barbarism. It has not only

made human life secure, but revolutionised the industrial and

social economy of the locality.

To a considerable extent it has replaced the quarter-lot

with the small farm, and the single crop with diversified

cultivation. It has transformed the speculative instincts of

the people into a spirit of sober industrialism. It has raised

the standard of living and improved the character of the

homes. It has planted the rose bush and the pansy where only

the sunflower cast its shadow, and it has twined the ivy and

the honeysuckle over doors which formerly knew not the touch

of beauty. It has made neighbours and society where once there

were loneliness and heart-hunger. It has broken the chains of

hopeless mortgages and crowned industry with independence.

The history of irrigation in the United States reads like a romance.

Competent authorities have expressed the opinion that truly scientific

farming is only possible where irrigation takes the place of rain,

and where the elements of fertility are retained in the soil. American

experience supports this view. Farms of from ten to forty acres

support whole families in comfort, if not in affluence, and one acre

yields as much as five of the best land in the rainfall belt. Whether

land is used for mixed farming or crop cultivation, the best results

are achieved when moisture can be applied or withheld according to the

needs of the crop. Without irrigation, crops may be more certain

in the coastal belt and on the intermediate tableland, but with

irrigation the advantage will undoubtedly lie with our Western lands.

A downpour may do irremediable harm to a ripening crop or at harvest

time, and to that danger the plain lands of the interior are less

liable than those in the region of heavier rainfall.

In some parts of Queensland, principally near the coast, irrigation

has already attained some prominence. In 1907 water was applied

artificially to 9,612 acres. Of this area, 4,492 acres were in the

Burdekin Delta, the water being drawn from the Burdekin, from lagoons,

and from wells. The rainfall is comparatively light, and the marked

increase in the cane crop on the irrigated lands is apparent to the

most casual observer. In the Bundaberg district 2,350 acres were

irrigated from the Burnett River and from wells; the vegetable and

fruit growers of Bowen irrigated 356 acres; and water was applied

to 482 acres in the neighbourhood of Rockhampton. Artesian water was

supplied to 100 acres at Barcaldine and 240 acres at Hungerford far

out on the New South Wales border.

In the Western States of America, where water is measured out

with mathematical accuracy and applied with clockwork regularity,

agriculture has been raised almost to the rank of an exact science.

The soil of Western Queensland is quite equal to that of the States

in fertility, and similar methods should here produce similar results.

When even the sterile Sahara is gradually disappearing before the

irrigation works of French engineers, there is no need to despond

regarding the future of the very driest parts of Queensland.

In Egypt and Spain and in several of the American States, the water

for irrigation is obtained from perennial streams drawing their

supplies from distant snow-clad mountains. Kansas differs in this

respect from other States. The description of the rivers of Western

Kansas by an American humorist might have been penned with equal

appositeness of the rivers of Western Queensland: "They are a mile

wide, and an inch thick; they have a large circulation, but very

little influence." Fortunately for Kansas, water is everywhere

procurable by sinking shallow wells. In Dakota and Texas, thousands of

millions of gallons are poured on to the land daily from thousands of

artesian wells. Though lofty mountain chains are lacking, with summits

high above the line of perpetual snow and giving birth to rivers

rivalling Nile and Mississippi in volume, both of these latter sources

of supply are available in Queensland. East and west of the Great

Divide, abundance of water has been obtained from wells. Our western

rivers may flow intermittently on the surface, but sub-artesian water

is plentiful in many localities, and the great artesian basin, with

its area of no less than 372,000 square miles, coincides generally

with that part of the State which has a rainfall of 20 inches or less,

a wise Providence having apparently created this huge subterranean

reservoir to guard against excessive evaporation and to compensate for

the light rains.

There is still another supply open. Allowing for a very large

percentage of the water that finds its way into the watercourses of

the West sinking into the earth or being lost through evaporation, a

tremendous quantity that now runs to waste could be conserved by works

such as the Government of New South Wales are constructing in the

Murrumbidgee basin. Irrigation on a large scale is beyond the means of

individuals--it must be undertaken either by private co-operation

or by State enterprise; and preferably the latter. Irrigation and

afforestation are both necessary for the successful development of

the West. If water can be supplied to settlers at a cost which is

not prohibitive, whether it be drawn from storage reservoirs or from

subterranean sources, the face of the country will quickly be changed.

Instead of a handful of pastoral lessees controlling in some instances

areas of hundreds of thousands of acres, a much larger population of

grazier farmers will be settled on much smaller holdings, enjoying

all the benefits--educational, social, and civic--which result from

concentrated settlement.

A product of the land which is intimately connected with settlement,

if somewhat outside the scope of this chapter, is timber. The forests

of Queensland are very extensive, and contain numerous timbers of

great value for building and cabinet-making. Chief among the former

are several species of pine, hardwood, beech, and ash. The most

beautiful and valuable of the ornamental woods are red cedar, silky

oak, bean-tree, and maple. In the earliest settled districts in

the South most of these have become comparatively scarce. The

timber-getter has been through the scrubs and forests, and much that

could not be converted into lumber has been destroyed by fire, to make

the ground ready for the plough. In North Queensland there are immense

quantities available, especially of the ornamental varieties, and

a profitable trade has been opened up with the southern part of the

State and with Sydney and Melbourne. Formerly the timber became the

property of the selector, but now a royalty is charged, which yields

the Crown a considerable revenue, and selection is deferred until the

marketable trees have been removed. To prevent the exhaustion of the

supplies, and as a preliminary to reafforestation, reserves have been

proclaimed in several parts of the State to act as nurseries.

Of the 429,120,000 acres contained in Queensland, at the close of 1908

some 21,500,000 acres--or just one-twentieth of the total area--had

been selected as agricultural farms and homesteads; 31,000,000 acres

were held as grazing and scrub selections, 56,000,000 acres were under

occupation license or depasturing right, and 186,000,000 acres under

pastoral lease, the remainder consisting either of reserves, mineral

lands, or unoccupied land in remote localities.

From every district where land is open to agricultural selection,

however, comes the report that the demand is keen. No sooner is an

area thrown open to selection than it is eagerly applied for, and the

number of those who signify their desire to become personal residents

in order to obtain priority is fast increasing. The Australian States,

New Zealand, the British Isles, and Germany are all furnishing their

quota of seekers after the cheap and excellent lands Queensland has to

offer.

Provision has been made by the Legislature for all kinds of

settlement--purely agricultural, mixed farming, and grazing. The

areas vary, being governed by the quality of the land, rainfall, the

presence or absence of permanent water, and proximity to a market or a

railway--in other words, by the amount required to provide the settler

with a comfortable income. The State is a generous landlord, and every

allowance is made for the difficulties of selectors in the earlier

stages of their occupancy. The man who wishes to acquire a freehold

has the opportunity of gratifying his desire. The man who objects to

that tenure has it in his power to obtain a lease in perpetuity. The

best settler being generally the man who intends to earn his living

entirely from the soil, and is prepared to reside continuously upon

the land, men of that class are very properly accorded priority over

those who do not intend to reside in person. Particulars regarding the

different tenures and the conditions upon which land may be obtained

from the Crown will be found in Appendix E.

The State assists the agriculturist in many ways. The Agricultural

College at Gatton is doing valuable service in training young men and

in carrying on experimental work. Six State farms, at two of which

apprentices are taken, have been established in as many widely

separated districts to ascertain by experiment the crops and methods

of cultivation most suited to local conditions, and impart the results

of their labours to the neighbouring farmers. Some of these farms have

valuable stud flocks and dairy herds, from which settlers can obtain

high-class stock. At Cairns tropical products are being tested and

propagated at a State nursery. Useful educational work is also being

done at the Sugar Experiment Station at Mackay. These institutions are

under the direct supervision of the Department of Agriculture, which

also employs experts in dairying, fruit culture, and tobacco growing

and curing. A botanist, an entomologist, and an agricultural chemist

are highly necessary and valuable members of the departmental staff,

and much useful information is disseminated through the medium of the

"Agricultural Journal," published by the Department.

[Illustration: THRESHING WHEAT, EMU VALE, KILLARNEY RAILWAY]

[Illustration: COFFEE PLANTATION, KURANDA, CAIRNS RAILWAY]

In addition to giving instruction, the Government have built sheds in

the principal farming centres on the Darling Downs for the storage of

wheat and other grain until the farmers can dispose of their crops

to advantage. Cheap money is supplied through the medium of the

Agricultural Bank. There are trust funds from which advances are made

to those who desire to build co-operative flour or sugar mills, butter

and cheese factories, or meat-preserving works. Railways have been

constructed in the older farming districts, produce is carried at

moderate rates, and subsidies are given to steamship companies for the

carriage of produce to oversea markets.

All this has been done for the man already on the land. Much is

likewise being done to help the man who wishes to become a settler.

Railways are being built into districts in which the Crown owns large

areas fit for close settlement. In other localities roads are made,

land is cleared, and wells and bores are sunk. Money is advanced on

liberal terms and at a low rate of interest by the Agricultural Bank

for the making of improvements and the purchase of stock, implements,

and machinery. Land is cheap, and special concessions are given by

the Railway Department to new settlers when taking up their land. The

annual rent forms an instalment of the purchase money, and payments

may be deferred during the initial years of occupancy, when the

selector is under heavy expense and is getting little or no return

from his land.

North and south along the coast, and west to the setting sun, long

stretches of thick wood or grassy plain present themselves to the eye,

solitary as in the dawn of creation, only awaiting the advent of the

settler to be transformed into a scene of bustling activity.

Endowed with a sunny and salubrious climate, a fruitful soil, an

immense territory, Queensland has room for many millions of people;

but those people must be of European birth or descent. For many

years the settled policy of the country in regard to immigration was

conservative. Now, however, all political parties are agreed upon the

need for a larger population--but primarily an agrarian population.

The great obstacles to immigration from Europe on any considerable

scale are distance and expense. America is distant but a few days'

sail, and the cost of a passage is correspondingly low. To place

Queensland on an equally favourable footing, the Government have

arranged with the British-India Steam Navigation Company to bring

adult males from the United Kingdom to the State upon payment by the

immigrants of L4 each. The rate for adult females is L2 per head,

and L8 for males and females over 40 and under 55 years of age. Free

passages may be granted to agricultural labourers introduced under

contract if the employer pays a fee of L5 and guarantees a year's

employment at approved wages. The balance of the passage-money in

every case is paid by the State. Female domestic servants, and the

wives and children of contract or part-paying immigrants, are carried

free. Immigrants may select land before leaving the old country, with

the option of getting a refund if not satisfied with their choice

after their arrival in Queensland. Full particulars of the various

forms of immigration will be found in Appendix F.

In 1908 the number of those who came from the British Isles was only

2,584, but the numbers are increasing since the inauguration of the

B.I.S.N. service _via_ Torres Strait, 2,737 immigrants having arrived

during the first nine months of this year. Hundreds of desirable

settlers and their families are coming every year from the Southern

States and New Zealand, attracted by the cheaper land and brighter

prospects. The stream of newcomers is now but a tiny rivulet; but,

when each proclaims to his friends his success in the land of his

adoption, that rivulet will swell to a mighty river.

Cheap passages and the cheap land across the Atlantic have till now

turned westward the eyes of the millions of Europe anxious to become

their own masters and to live a wider, freer life than is possible

in their native lands. Queensland is taking steps to bring her

attractions more prominently under the notice of the British and

European public in order to secure a share of the rural populations

of the Old World for herself. She has advantages--natural, material,

social, and political--in no way inferior to those presented by other

countries. Life and liberty are nowhere more secure. A wide expanse of

sea divides us from the nearest foreign Power. Living is cheaper and

existence easier than in those lands to which the people of Europe are

flocking. The sun is always shining, and winter, instead of being a

period of enforced idleness, is a season when labour is greatly in

demand. Crop succeeds crop without pause, and seed-time and harvest

follow each other in quick procession. Stock feed in the open

throughout the year, and winter brings little diminution in the yield

of dairy produce.

With free institutions, individual liberty, and great natural

resources, Queensland is destined to become the home of a numerous and

prosperous people. It is our manifest duty to see that it forms part

of a strong, self-reliant, British nation beneath the Southern Cross,

linked in the bonds of affection with the Motherland and our brethren

across the seas, with arms open in welcome to our kin and colour, but

ready to defend ourselves against aggression. In the great work, the

men who are subduing the wilderness and converting it into a smiling

garden can be relied upon to play their part. Nature is a tender

foster-mother; freedom is in the air. Stalwart in frame, courageous

in heart, true scions of the race from which they spring, rejoicing in

their manhood, grateful for their heritage, the yeomen of Queensland

are the pride of their country.

"Not without envy Wealth at times must look

On their brown strength who wield the reaping-hook

And scythe, or at the forge-fire shape the plough

Or the steel harness of the steeds of steam;

All who, by skill and patience, anyhow

Make service noble, and the earth redeem

From savageness. By kingly accolade

Than theirs was never worthier knighthood made."

CHAPTER III.

THE SUGAR INDUSTRY.

Sugar-cane in the Northern Hemisphere.--The Rise of the

Beet Industry.--Abolition of Slave Labour in West Indies.

--Reorganisation of Industry on Scientific Basis.

--Establishment of Industry in Queensland.--Difficulties

of Early Planters.--Stoppage of Pacific Island Labour.

--Evolution of Small Holdings and Erection of Central

Mills.--Reintroduction of Pacific Islanders.--Stoppage of

Pacific Island Labour by Commonwealth Legislation.--Bonus

on White-grown Sugar.--Benefits Arising from Separating

Cultivation and Manufacture.--Contrast between Past and

Present Methods.--Scientific Cultivation.--Recent Statistics.

--The Future of the Industry.--Queensland Leading the Van in

Establishing White Agriculturists in Tropics.

Long before the Christian era classical and sacred writers made

mention of that "sweet cane" whose product plays so important a part

in the everyday requirements of modern life.

Sugar-cane was introduced into Spain by the Moors early in the eighth

century. The Moorish empire sank before the combined might of Spain

in 1492, and in that year Columbus added a new world to the realm of

Castile. Within a few years the sugar industry had taken firm root

in the West Indies, and on every isle dotting the Spanish Main waved

countless fields of cane, yielding crops beside which the production

of Andalusia, already waning under the dead hand of Spain, paled into

insignificance.

To the first Spanish planters is due the system upon which the sugar

industry was conducted in the tropics for more than three hundred

years. The haughty hidalgo, scorning to labour with his own hands,

forced into his service the unresisting natives of the West. Unused

to strenuous toil, they sank beneath the burden. Touched with pity for

their sad lot, and anxious to save them from extirpation, Las Casas,

"the Apostle of the Indians," urged the substitution of the children

of Ham, whom he and all good Christians believed to have been doomed

to perpetual bondage; and African slavery thus became an established

institution in the West.

Whether under Spanish or British rule, the sugar industry of the West

Indies, and of all other tropical countries to which it was extended,

was carried on under a system of large plantations, owned as a rule

by men of good family, who, deeming personal control beneath their

dignity, deputed to overseers of meaner rank the supervision of their

servile labourers. The profusion of Nature, coupled with vicarious

management and the absence of competition, engendered extravagance,

improvident husbandry, and wasteful and unscientific manufacture, the

while there rose to Heaven--

"Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,

Like a tale of little-meaning, tho' the words are strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil."

[Illustration: SUGAR-MILL, CHILDERS, NORTH COAST RAILWAY]

Until well on in the nineteenth century little progress was made

either in cultivation or manufacture. For more than three hundred

years the history of the industry was one of slave labour, crude

methods, and planters to whom life in the tropics meant exile from

Europe, and whose sole object was to amass wealth to be spent in the

pleasures of the courts of St. James, Versailles, or Madrid.

The first blow struck at the old-time theory that the tropics were

created solely to supply the needs of dwellers in temperate climes

was dealt by Napoleon when he took steps to establish the beet-sugar

industry in France. His object was twofold--to render Continental

Europe, which was then lying at his mercy, independent of Britain and

the British colonies; and to cripple the trade of the only Power which

had never stooped to his sway. Unconsciously, at the same time he laid

the foundation of a tropical Britain peopled by the British race.

The successful establishment of the beet-sugar industry called for the

application of industrial, scientific, and organising capacity of

the highest order, and the Governments of France and other European

countries fostered its development by heavy bounties.

The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834 and the

later emancipation of the negroes in the United States so disorganised

the sugar industry of the West that those engaged in it were too

engrossed with their own affairs to heed the progress of the beet

industry of Europe. The output of beet sugar steadily forged ahead

until, in the early eighties, it was almost equal to the output of

cane sugar. Tropical planters and manufacturers then found themselves

engaged in a life-and-death struggle for which they were ill-equipped.

Forced by inexorable necessity to face the situation, they realised

that only by following the example of their rivals--by calling in the

aid of science both in cultivation and in manufacture, and by

paying the strictest attention to the financial side of their

enterprise--could they hope to hold their own.

Just at the time that the Southern States of America were fighting

desperately in defence of the slave system, the foundations of the

Queensland sugar industry were being laid. Despite the high prices

then ruling for sugar, the profits were not large, owing to the

primitive methods of cultivation and manufacture adopted on the

plantations. In time, even in this remote quarter of the globe the

growth of the beet industry compelled the planters to make radical

changes. Antiquated husbandry, crude processes, and wasteful

management were superseded by modern scientific methods. The

subdivision of large estates, the substitution of small white growers

for gangs of unskilled coloured labourers, and the establishment of

co-operative central factories were Queensland's contribution to the

solution of the problem of Beet _versus_ Cane.

As Napoleon in his wildest dreams had no conception that his

anti-British policy would ultimately lead to the expansion and

evolution of the sugar industry of the tropics, so the Queenslander

who first planted a few sticks of sugar-cane on the shores of Moreton

Bay half a century ago little foresaw that from that humble beginning

would develop the greatest agricultural industry of this State--an

industry which, if treated with continued consideration and sympathy

by the Commonwealth, bids fair to revolutionise the hitherto accepted

view of the relations of the white races to the tropics. Yet, if we

read aright the brief history of the Queensland sugar industry, and

appreciate its present position, that first planter commenced a work

which is likely to lead to permanent settlement in the tropics by men

of European descent.

There was little to distinguish the establishment of our sugar

industry from similar ventures in other parts of the tropics where

the supply of cheap coloured native labour was insufficient for

the requirements of the planters. The men who opened up the first

plantations in Queensland were not Australians, except by adoption.

Their experience had been gained in Java, Mauritius, the West Indies,

and elsewhere. They came to this country imbued with the old notion

that the best and most economical means of carrying on tropical

agriculture was to cultivate large estates by the aid of gangs of

coloured labourers; and it is a moot point whether, fifty years ago,

any other method of establishing tropical industries in Queensland

was possible. Certain land concessions were given to encourage the

newcomers, and they were permitted to import Pacific Islanders, under

Government supervision, as contract labourers for work in the fields.

Not all the early planters had been sugar-growers previously. In the

Mackay district, which has always been one of the chief sugar centres,

the first settlers grew cotton, tobacco, and arrowroot. But early in

the sixties it was recognised that the production of sugar offered

the most satisfactory and profitable field for their enterprise.

Generally, they were representatives of that class of whom Benjamin

Kidd, in his "Control of the Tropics," says: "The more advanced

peoples, driven to seek new outlooks for their activities, will be

subject to a gradually increasing pressure to turn their attention

to the great natural field of enterprise which still remains in the

development of the tropics."

It was not sufficient for these early planters to take up land and

plant their crops; they had to erect mills, where the cane could be

converted into sugar, and this required capital. The cost of labour,

provisions, and supplies was enormous. Communication along the coast

was such that goods were taken North in small sailing vessels, and the

pioneers were quite accustomed to travelling in a small steamer which

anchored under the lee of a convenient island during the darkness

of the night. Those who see the condition of the industry which has

evolved from these first efforts must, in justice to the pioneers,

recall the difficulties and risks which were faced by them.

Forty years ago the industry was an infant struggling with its

teething troubles, still liable to premature death. In 1871 there were

only 9,581 acres under sugar-cane in the whole of Queensland, and the

production of sugar was only 3,762 tons, not equal to half the output

of one of our large modern factories. The industry was then chiefly

confined to the South, but it soon made its way northwards, and

expanded so rapidly that, in 1881, the area under cane had increased

to 28,026 acres, and there were no less than 103 mills in operation.

The industry then entered upon the first of its great reverses. Owing

to the enormous increase in the output of beet sugar in Europe, prices

fell rapidly. The first of the larger class of factories, conducted on

modern lines, with improved appliances, came into existence, and small

mills, unable to compete successfully, began to close. Labour supplies

from the South Sea Islands became more expensive, and a class of white

men, originally labourers who had saved money, took up selections

as sugar farms, and sought to dispose of their crops of cane to the

planter-proprietors of existing mills. The latter, alarmed by the

passage of legislation decreeing an end to the employment of coloured

labour, planted larger areas with the object of taking off as much

cane as possible before they were deprived of the services of the

Polynesian labourers then under contract. The immediate result was

that the small farmers were unable to sell their crops at reasonable

rates; and to help them the Government of the day, whose avowed policy

it was to have the industry carried on by white labour, decided to

advance money to groups of these farmers to enable them to erect

co-operative factories for the treatment of their cane. As an

experiment, two such factories were built in the Mackay district,

where the need was most clamant; and thus was laid the foundation of

the central mill system, which has given such an impetus to the growth

of the industry, conducted on the basis of white labour. Tentative

though the experiment was, and though for many years not a complete

financial success from the point of view of the mills, the erection of

these mills at least showed that the interests of the farmer and the

factory were mutually interdependent.

It was seen almost at once by the large planter that the farmer,

working in the field beside his employees, was more eager for success

than when he worked as labourer or overseer for another. The control

of the factories, under directorates of farmers, was found to be more

satisfactory and more economical than when in the hands of planters

or managers with old-fashioned ideas of organisation--with managers,

sub-managers, and large administrative staffs. Five years after the

first loan was granted by the Government, and barely three after the

rollers were started in the first of the two pioneer mills, these

facts had become manifest. It says much for the sense and courage

of the planters that this revolution in established methods did

not dismay them, and their wisdom was shown in setting to work

energetically to put the new methods into practice in the conduct of

their own business.

In 1891 the Colonial Sugar Refining Company set the example by cutting

up one of its large estates into farms of moderate size. Ten years

earlier that estate was a cattle station, employing a couple of white

men and a few aboriginals. Before the first six months of 1891 had

passed, it was the home of fifty or sixty settlers, a number trebled

within the next few years.

The new departure largely overcame the labour difficulty; in addition

to that, it went far to meet the low prices for sugar. Many of the

factories still continued to make sugar for sale in the open market,

and a considerable quantity found its way, profitably, to London.

In 1892 a special Commissioner of the London "Times" (Miss Flora Shaw,

now Lady Lugard) travelled through the sugar districts, and noted the

evolution which was taking place. She seemed to foresee the future

more clearly than many of those actually engaged in the industry.

"Even the sugar industry," she wrote, "appears as a whole to be

half-unconscious of the results of the reorganisation through which it

has passed, and lies, as it were, still asleep in the dawn of its own

prosperity."

[Illustration: SISAL HEMP AND CANEFIELDS, SOUTH ISIS]

[Illustration: CANEFIELDS, ISIS RAILWAY]

[Illustration: SUGAR CANE AND MILL, HUXLEY, ISIS RAILWAY]

The middle nineties saw the fuller development of the central mill

system. More groups of farmers were formed, loans were obtained

from the Government, and further factories, mostly large and all

well-equipped with the most modern machinery, were erected. A sudden

demand arose in all parts of the coastal belt for sugar lands. The

wiser of the planters subdivided their estates; owners of lands

hitherto unutilised cut them up, and sold them to the inrush of

farmers. The financial crisis of the early nineties and the action

of Parliament in removing the embargo on the introduction of Pacific

Islanders were no doubt contributing factors to the rapid increase in

the number of would-be sugar-growers; but, whatever the cause, certain

it is that at this time the spurt in cane cultivation and white

settlement was greater than at any other period in the history of the

industry in Queensland.

The year 1898 saw no less than 111,012 acres under cane, with a sugar

production of 163,734 tons. The factories employed 3,709 men, nearly

all Europeans, and the declared value of the sugar sent away

from Queensland exceeded L1,300,000. The actual number of farmers

cultivating cane in that year is not ascertainable, but it

approximated 2,500.

It may fairly be claimed that Queensland has conquered her tropical

littoral. Between Nerang in the South and Port Douglas in the North

stretches a coastline of nearly 1,000 miles. At intervals along this

great distance are large areas under cane and a number of considerable

towns almost entirely dependent upon the sugar industry--including

important centres like Bundaberg, with over 10,000 inhabitants, and

Mackay and Cairns, each containing over 5,000 souls. Uninhabited

swamps and forests and mountain lands--covered with rank tropical

grasses or dense growths of trees and creepers--have given place

to cultivated fields, in which stand thousands of comfortable homes

rendered accessible by well-made roads, while many districts are

provided with most of the adjuncts to modern civilisation. In fact,

the white settler and worker live under conditions in no way inferior

to those prevailing in agricultural centres in other parts of the

world. European brains and European labour have brought into being

a flourishing industry, and converted into one of the healthiest

portions of Australia, fitted to become the permanent home of millions

of our own race, a malarial belt where it had for long been thought

none but coloured people would ever be able to labour and live.

The latter end of the nineties and the opening years of the present

decade saw a further development of the principle of white settlement

in our tropics. The federation of the Australian States offered the

sugar-producer some escape from the keen competition of the world's

markets through its fiscal policy of unhampered interstate freetrade,

with protection against the world.

The Commonwealth Parliament, in its first session (1901), decided that

the eight or nine thousand Pacific Islanders employed in cultivation

should be returned to their islands, granting, by way of compensation

for the increased cost of production, a bounty upon all white-grown

sugar. As was the case under somewhat similar circumstances nearly

twenty years before, this withdrawal of coloured labour gave a great

impetus to planting. There was naturally some anxiety as to whether

the supply of white labour in the future would be sufficient; but the

profits made in the industry enabled the farmers to pay high wages at

harvest time, and men flocked to the sugar districts from all parts of

Australia.

One result of the labour legislation has been that many of the growers

on large areas have considered it to their interest still further

to subdivide their holdings, and their action has had the effect of

increasing largely the number of farmers. It was estimated that last

year the registered white growers of sugar-cane in Queensland numbered

no less than 4,425. In addition to these, there is still a small

number employing casual coloured labour. Of the whole output of

151,000 tons of sugar, fully 93 per cent. was produced without the aid

of any coloured labour. In other words, white men almost exclusively,

whether as employers or as workers, are now engaged in developing

our tropical resources, and peopling with our own race solitudes

previously untrodden save by a few aboriginal natives.

Less than thirty years ago it was the belief of most of those engaged

in sugar production that the work of the mills was one of extreme

complexity, and that success depended upon the possession of some

special secret in the working. At that time the planter was also the

miller. Now the work of cultivation is generally dissociated from the

manufacture of sugar. Principally owing to the proprietary interest of

the farmers in the various central mills, every stage of the work

is openly and intelligently discussed, results are compared, and an

efficiency attained which in many respects is equal to any in the

sugar world. The factories no longer make sugar for the open market,

but sell to the refiners. Analytical chemists check the work at every

stage in the factory, and labour-saving appliances are the rule and

not the exception. A modern factory is a wonderful illustration of

the application of science, mechanical invention, and organisation to

human industry.

Nothing can better indicate the evolution of the Queensland sugar

industry during the past forty years than a comparison between one of

the first mills established in the State and one of the most modern.

Forty years ago the sugar-cane was drawn in a cart close to the single

set of crushing rollers, flung on the ground, and then fed, stick by

stick, through the rollers, emerging with less than half the juice

extracted. The crushed sticks were taken out and spread on the ground

in the open, until dry enough to be collected and brought to the

furnaces for use as fuel. In the modern factory the cane arrives by

tram or train, is mechanically placed on a long endless carrier, and

passes, at the rate of twenty tons or more per hour, through several

sets of rollers, the refuse, caught by strainers, returning to the

rollers, while the megass, or exhausted fibre, goes direct to the

furnaces.

The old mill crushed enough cane during six months to make two or

three hundred tons of sugar. The modern factory deals with sufficient

to produce anything from six to ten thousand tons, and in some cases

more.

Steam has taken the place of fires at the boiling stations, and

boiling _in vacuo_ has been as fully adopted in Queensland as in other

parts of the sugar-producing world. In the old mill the _masse cuite_,

the last stage of the product before the sugar is dried off, had to

be dug out from tanks, men standing up to their knees in the sticky

substance, and handling it in buckets. Now, the _masse cuite_ goes

direct from the vacuum pans to the receivers, and thence into the

centrifugals. There the molasses is separated, and the sugar is

carried automatically to the bags standing on weighing machines only a

few feet from the railway trucks which are waiting to take the product

to the ship's hold.

The old-style factory carried on its operations solely by day. The

present-day factory is lit throughout with electric light, and works

day and night (Sunday excepted) for five or six months, employing,

according to its capacity, from 100 to 150 men. Around each factory

has sprung up a small settlement of artisans, storekeepers, and

others, while, under a statute passed by the Queensland Parliament,

the employees are decently housed, fed, and assured of good

sanitation, their mental, moral, and financial welfare being provided

for by the institution of reading and recreation rooms, and the

establishment of branches of the Government Savings Bank.

Turning to the agricultural operations, similar evidence of the

evolution of the industry is to be found. Time was when a visitor

could stand on some slight eminence and look over vast areas of cane,

the vista unbroken save for a few trees, or the plantation roads

running like ribbons through a sea of waving green. Now the prospect

discloses the homes of farmers standing out amongst the cane, with all

the evidences of a closely settled and thriving population. The large

gangs of labourers tending the cultivation have for the most part

disappeared. Instead, the farmer and his sons, with possibly one or

two labourers, work side by side in the fields.

At harvest time long lines of carts drawing cane to the mills no

longer make a picturesque feature in the landscape; locomotives now

haul cane-trains over the hundreds of miles of narrow-gauge tramline

which radiate from the factories to all points from which supplies of

cane are drawn. Where but a few years back was naught but the lonely

bush, its silence broken only by the lowing of a few cattle, the

occasional passing of an aboriginal stockman or a party of drovers,

carriers, or a chance swagman--birds of passage between the inland

stations and the ports on the coast--townships have sprung into being,

and every half-mile reveals the home of the farmer nestling among his

fields of emerald green.

During the past few years, mainly owing to the satisfactory prices

received for their cane, the farmers have been profitably employed.

They have learned in the school of experience that cane cultivation

requires practical knowledge, and that in many cases their land needs

special treatment, which they must study for themselves. Nothing has

brought this fact home to the farmers more thoroughly than the work

of the Sugar Experiment Station at Mackay, and the valuable reports

published by the late Director, Dr. W. Maxwell.

In the early seventies the sugar-planters of Mackay awoke one morning

to discover the whole of their crops destroyed, as if a fire had

passed over them. They then grew only one variety of cane, which had

become diseased. Fresh varieties had to be introduced from abroad,

with all the risk of introducing canes that were worthless, or,

worse still, of bringing in pests or diseases. So far, sugar-cane

in Queensland has been singularly and fortunately free from

natural enemies. Thanks to the work of Mr. H. Tryon, the Government

Entomologist, the grower readily recognises the presence of insect

pests, and knows how to deal promptly with them on their first

appearance.

The farmer is learning to know his cane; he studies its habits, and

is quick to appreciate the good and bad effects of his operations. The

analyses at the mills have directed his attention to the importance

of cane being a good sugar-producer, and, as he is in many cases a

shareholder in a factory, he is alive to the fact that weight of cane

is not the only essential to success. For many years the need for

securing canes richer in sugar was largely neglected all over the

world, but recently efforts have been made to repeat in the case of

cane the splendid results won by such men as the late Sir J. B.

Lawes and the French chemist, Vilmorin, in connection with the

sugar-producing qualities of the beet. The officials at the Queensland

Sugar Experiment Stations have tested fully sixty varieties of cane,

including some from Papua, to discover the agricultural and milling

value of each.

[Illustration: CAMBANORA GAP, HEAD OF CONDAMINE, KILLARNEY]

[Illustration: MINTO CRAG, DUGANDAN, FASSIFERN DISTRICT]

It is only natural that in an industry whose operations extend over so

many degrees of latitude conditions must greatly vary. Irrigation is

necessary in some districts, notably in the Burdekin Delta, which

lies in a dry belt. Drainage is the prime requisite in other places.

Fertilisation varies with the soils, and information as to the latter

has been compiled in a series of exhaustive analyses made by Dr. W.

Maxwell at the laboratory in Bundaberg. In South Queensland the cane

frequently takes two years to mature, while in the extreme North

fifteen months after planting it is fit for the rollers.

According to the official estimate of the Commonwealth Treasurer for

1908, 4,825 farmers were then engaged in the industry in Queensland,

91.7 per cent. of whom employed white labour only, the number of

employees being in round figures 30,000. In 1902 the number of farmers

was only 2,496, showing the rapidity with which closer settlement is

taking place. It is true that of late there has been a reduction in

the area under cultivation, but this is probably attributable to the

tendency to make "intense cultivation" a feature of the industry in

order to solve the labour problem. Some of the larger areas under crop

have been curtailed, and the reduction has not been made good by the

increased settlement; but, as in the eighties those engaged in the

industry found, possibly unconsciously, a remedy for the dearth of

labour, so we may reasonably expect that the present difficulty in

obtaining men for the ordinary work of cultivation will be met by new

developments.

What does the future hold for us? Can we continue the work of building

up a white nation beneath a tropical sun--a task which in many parts

of the world is considered quixotic? The areas available for cane

cultivation are still enormous, and, though hesitancy and doubt may

for a time join hands in checking expansion, the main facts remain

that there is room for the people and that there is a demand for the

product. Australia, in her fiscal policy, has recognised that the

sugar industry is a national industry, and our statesmen realise that

it is doing for the Australian tropics what no other industry on the

coastal lands has yet seriously attempted--what, indeed, no other

country in the world is as yet prepared to try.

Assuming, as we have a right to assume, a sympathetic Australian

Government, we can turn to the future with eyes full of hope. There

are many directions in which we may look for the expansion of the

industry. The increasing population of the Commonwealth involves

an added capacity to consume the product. The field of invention

in regard to the harvesting of the cane has yet to be explored and

exploited. At present the cost of cutting and loading a field of cane

is from eight to ten times that of harvesting an equal amount of

sugar beets. Experiments are constantly being made with mechanical

appliances for cutting and loading and unloading cane, and this is

one direction in which Queenslanders may look forward hopefully to the

time when they will not only lessen the volume of labour required, but

when they will reduce the burdensome nature of the work, and place

the cane-sugar industry in a position to compete successfully with the

great beet-sugar industry of Europe.

Some 250,000 gallons of rum are distilled annually at Bundaberg, but

we are told officially that 4,000,000 gallons of molasses go to waste

every year. The conversion of this product into foodstuffs for live

stock as an adjunct to the main industry would add materially to the

profits.

In some sugar districts, dairying is finding a footing, and possibly

the time is not far distant when a form of mixed farming will enable

the cane-grower to utilise more of the by-products of his industry,

at the same time rendering him more independent of unfavourable

meteorological conditions. Generally speaking, improvement in

the quality and quantity of the cane, intense culture, mechanical

inventions, and the use of by-products are all within the bounds of

possibility, and will make for further progress.

But all these things are of secondary importance compared with the

need of a settled working population. Back from the coast lies a range

of mountains, rising often 3,000 feet above the level of the sea.

Along and behind these mountains are excellent lands, well suited for

close settlement and for the production of cereals, and the fruits and

vegetables so greatly needed in the more humid areas of the littoral

belt. The climate of this elevated hinterland is excellent, and the

close settlement of these lands will furnish one of the safeguards

of the sugar industry, seeing that a permanent population within easy

reach will always be available for employment in the canefields and

sugar-mills. To a large extent, the populations of the lowlands and

the highlands will be mutually dependent upon each other.

In the early days of settlement in East and West Moreton and on the

Darling Downs, the small selector, with no capital in many cases save

a pair of strong hands, a courageous heart, and a tireless energy,

made his way every year to the squatter's shearing shed. No thought

had he of "knocking down" his hard-earned cheque. Labour disputes

never entered his mind. With his earnings he paid his rent and

improved his land. It was men of this stamp who built up the great

agricultural industry of Southern Queensland, and they and their

descendants of the second and third generations are the very cream

of the farmers of to-day. It is to a similar class of settlers in

the sugar districts and their hinterland that we look for the

proper settlement and development of our tropical lands. And in our

aspirations for a great white agricultural population we are entitled

to expect the sympathetic assistance of our kinsmen in the South and

of the Empire at large. For not only are we doing what we can to make

a prosperous and contented people, but we are doing a great work for

the whole of the white races. We are proving that the tropics can

be conquered and permanently settled by people of our own race and

colour; we are holding one of the gateways of the East; and we are

garrisoning an important outpost of the Empire. Kipling's stirring

words, written of Queensland, find an echo in the hearts of

Queenslanders--

The northern stirp beneath the southern skies--

I build a Nation for an Empire's need,

Suffer a little, and my land shall rise,

Queen over lands indeed!

CHAPTER IV.

A HALF-CENTURY OF MINING.

The Quest for Gold a Colonising Agency.--Earliest

Discoveries of the Precious Metal in Queensland.

--Port Curtis.--Rockhampton District.--Peak Downs.

--Gympie.--Ravenswood.--Charters Towers.--Palmer.--Mount

Morgan.--Croydon.--Later Discoveries.--Yield at Charters

Towers and Mount Morgan.--Copper Mining.--Tin.--Silver.

--Queensland the Home of All Kinds of Minerals and Precious

Stones.--Mineral Wealth in Cairns Hinterland.--Copper

Deposits in Cloncurry District.--The Etheridge.--Anakie Gem

Field.--Opal Fields.--Extensive Coal Measures.--Railway

Communication with Mining Fields.--Value of Queensland

Mineral Output.--Prospects of Industry.

The quest for gold, to say nothing of other minerals, has had much to

do with the settlement and development of Queensland, apart from the

direct advantages conferred on the State by her mining industry.

It has brought to our shores many thousands of people who would not

otherwise have come here; it has helped to open up for occupations

other than mining previously unknown and unexplored regions that, but

for the prospector, might have lain dormant for many more years;

while the successful development of the territory's rich and almost

unlimited mineral wealth has aided in making our State known in other

parts of the world, and thus assisted in attracting hither the people

and capital that have been the chief contributing factors to our

wonderful progress.

Fifty years ago, when what is now Queensland, casting itself free

from the parental skirts of New South Wales, began to walk alone, its

mining industry did not exist. It would not be correct to say that

gold--here, as elsewhere in Australia, the first to be sought and

found of the numerous minerals that have since proved a source of

so much wealth to the State--had not been then discovered upon

our shores. Fifteen years before, men attached to an official

establishment at Gladstone, Port Curtis, found "colours" of the yellow

metal; and in 1858, the year preceding "Separation," occurred the

Canoona "rush," which proved so disastrous to the 15,000 or 20,000

adventurers who then swarmed to the Rockhampton district in search

of the "saint-seducing gold." But the so-called "colours" detected at

picturesque Gladstone were nothing more than can to this day be traced

in scores of places in Queensland; while the find at Canoona proved a

fiasco so great as to spread abroad the impression that this part

of Australia, as a prospective field for mining enterprise, was a

delusion. But was it? Within a dozen miles or so of the scene of the

Canoona disappointment was situated the "mountain of gold" that has

since earned world-wide fame under the name of Mount Morgan; and

by the end of Queensland's first half-century the Rockhampton (or

Central) district has turned out gold to the sum of nearly 3,500,000

fine ounces, representing a money value of over L14,500,000--the bulk

of it won within the last moiety of the half-century.

[Illustration: MOUNT MORGAN: COPPER WORKS, LOOKING NORTH]

[Illustration: MOUNT MORGAN: GENERAL VIEW OF WORKS]

Three years after the foundation of the colony of Queensland gold

in payable quantities was discovered on the Peak Downs, inland from

Rockhampton; but it was not till the finding of the Gympie field

late in 1867--eight years after severance from New South Wales--that

Queensland first definitely took rank as a gold producer. Within six

months from the time when the wandering digger Nash, fossicking in

the gullies running into the upper Mary River, found the promising

specimens in his dish which made him hasten to Maryborough to report

his discovery, 15,000 men had flocked to the spot from all parts of

Australia. The place had hardly been heard of before. Pressmen in

Brisbane did not even know how to spell the name "Gympie" when first

the news arrived; but within a very few weeks its fame spread far

and wide. The gullies in the vicinity of Nash's claim were rich

and numerous. One nugget brought to light weighed nearly a thousand

ounces, and was worth L3,675. Soon alluvial gave place to quartz

mining, and within five years gold to the value of more than

L1,500,000 had been won. Up to the end of 1908--that is, in forty-one

years--the field had produced gold worth L10,350,000, and is still

"going strong." Like all other fields, it has of course had its

ups and downs, and just now is recovering its feet after one of

its "downs." Last year Gympie produced gold to the value of nearly

L270,000; the grade of its ore is improving, and its monthly yields

are now showing comparative increases.

Since the discovery of the Gympie goldfield there has been no

cessation in the progress of mining in Queensland. From one end of the

territory to another the existence of gold and other minerals has from

time to time been disclosed. For many years--

"Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!

Bright and yellow, hard and cold--"

but still much to be desired--was the magnet which attracted the

peripatetic prospector away from the comforts of civilisation into

the rugged wilds of the coastal ranges and the gullies and stony

stream-beds of the eastern watershed; and for a long while it was only

the gold discoveries that attracted much attention. A year or so after

the Gympie find, the Ravenswood goldfield, south-west from Townsville,

"broke out," to use the phrase of the old-time digger. In 1869 the

precious metal was found on the Gilbert River, and the Gilbert,

Etheridge, and Woolgar fields were proclaimed. Then came Charters

Towers, our premier goldfield, in 1872; the Palmer, inland from

Cooktown (then the very far North), in 1873; the Hodgkinson, a little

more to the south, in 1875; the great Mount Morgan in 1882; Croydon in

1886; and other discoveries, until Dickie, a veteran prospector, found

the Hamilton and Alice River fields in the Peninsula--the former in

1899 and the latter as late as 1904.

In its thirty-six years of existence Charters Towers has turned out

over 5,800,000 ounces--more than L24,600,000 worth of gold; last

year's output was of the value of L700,000; and to-day the indications

in the deeper ground of the field are such that there is reason to

expect that both the term of its existence and the volume of its

output will be greatly extended. At Mount Morgan--the show mine of

Queensland, and one of the greatest in the world--there has been

quarried out of the hill and dug from the depths beneath stone that,

under treatment by works in every way worthy of such a mine, has, in

a little over twenty-two years, yielded gold to the value of over

L13,760,000; has paid in wages and other expenditure about L7,000,000;

and has given to the fortunate holders of its 1,000,000 shares some

L7,230,000 in dividends. That is what the big mine has done. What is

it doing now? True, the phenomenal yields of gold and the high grade

of its auriferous ores that characterised the earlier years of its

history showed signs of diminishing as time went on; but diminishing

yields were counterbalanced by improved methods of mining and

treatment, with consequent reduction of costs; and a few years since

copper as well as gold was found in the lower levels, with the result

that the mine has become at once the most productive copper and the

most productive gold mine of the State. It has already turned out

copper to the value of about L1,500,000, which has to be added to the

gold yield, given above, to arrive at its total product; while the

value of the mine's aggregate output for 1908 (over L1,017,000) was

greater, with perhaps one exception, than that of any previous year in

its history.

Though for some years gold was the only string to the bow of

Queensland's mining industry, that state of things has long since

changed. In the early sixties copper was mined in the State, but then

and for many years afterwards only to a limited extent. Tin came

on the scene in 1872. During the first forty years of Queensland's

existence the gold won within her borders was four times the worth

of all other minerals and coal produced; but so rapid has been the

increase during the past ten years in the production of the industrial

metals--or "other minerals," as they are officially termed, to

distinguish them from gold--that in 1907 their value exceeded that of

the gold yield by over L170,000. Indeed, during the five years ending

with that year there was an almost phenomenal expansion. The output

of 1902 was of the value of only L589,960. In the following year it

increased to L846,280, and then for four years jumped up by leaps and

bounds, until in 1907 the yield was worth no less than L2,153,226.

The known mineral-producing country of Queensland extends over an

immense area. It begins on the southern border, where the Silver Spur

mine maintains a constant output of silver and other mineral products,

and where the Stanthorpe district, our first stanniferous field, still

materially assists, with the aid of dredges, in the tin production of

the State; and extends northerly a hundred miles beyond the goldfield

of Coen, in the Cape York Peninsula. Over this immense distance of

some 1,300 miles from south to north, and extending inland from 50

to 200 miles from the eastern coast, are located at varying intervals

fields producing gold, silver, copper, tin, coal, lead, sapphires,

manganese, wolfram, molybdenite, bismuth, and graphite; while further

to the west are the opal fields of Jundah, Opalton, and Kynuna, the

copper deposits of the vast Cloncurry district, the silver-lead mines

of Lawn Hills in the Burketown district, and the Croydon goldfield,

also on the Gulf waters. Queensland, with a huge area of 670,500

square miles and a scant population of little more than half a million

of people, has a hundred proclaimed gold, mineral, and coal fields,

having a combined area of about 50,000,000 acres.

Apart from goldfields, by far the most important and productive of

these areas is the tract of country which forms the hinterland of

the port of Cairns--a tract which includes the tin-mining centres of

Herberton, Stannary Hills, Irvinebank, Nymbool, and Reid's Creek;

the copper and silver-lead mines of Chillagoe and Mungana; the copper

mines of Mount Molloy and O.K.; the wolfram, molybdenite, and bismuth

mines of Wolfram Camp, Bamford, and Mount Carbine; and the antimony

deposits of the Mitchell River. The two large mineral fields into

which this portion of the State is now officially divided--Chillagoe

and Herberton--have together an area of over 8,500,000 acres. The port

of Cairns was not established till 1876--seventeen years after the

foundation of the State. Now there yearly pass through it from the

area mentioned minerals worth from L600,000 to L800,000, exclusive of

the mineral product from the Etheridge and Croydon fields, which also,

for the most part, finds an outlet through the same channel. Copper

and tin are responsible for more than half the amount named, but the

potentialities of the district as far as other minerals are concerned

are almost unlimited. Of wolfram--taking only one example--this part

of the State alone can supply the world's demand, and have a good deal

to spare afterwards. The Queensland Government Geologist has estimated

that the wolfram-bearing country in this portion of Queensland extends

over an area of 3,500 square miles. Given anything like a permanent

demand and a fair and steady market, wolfram production would soon

take a prominent position in our mining industry. The historical tin

mine of the district is the Vulcan, at Irvinebank, which has attained

the greatest depth (1,450 feet) reached by any tin mine in Queensland,

and where the appliances for recovering the metal are more up-to-date

than at Dolcoath, the most famous tin mine of Cornwall. During the

twenty-five years of its existence, the Vulcan Mine has from 106,000

tons of tin ore produced over 9,790 tons of concentrates, worth

something approaching L500,000, and has paid its lucky shareholders

dividends to the extent of L160,000. The opening up of this large and

prolific district is largely due to the enterprise of the Chillagoe

Company, which not only has developed extensively its several mines

and erected large ore-treatment works, but has built the railway--in

length 93 miles--which connects those mines and numerous others with

the Government railway at the top of the Coastal Range at Mareeba,

and is building a further extension to the Etheridge field, nearly 150

miles further inland.

Queensland is known as a country of magnificent distances, and one

example of its vast expanse is the extent of the copper area of the

Cloncurry district, which is tapped by the Great Northern Railway 480

miles westward from the port of Townsville. This district is by far

the largest tract of copper-bearing country in Australia, and one

of the largest in the world. As the crow flies, it extends north and

south for more than 150 miles, and east and west some 80 or 100 miles.

Over this large area, covering at least 15,000 square miles, copper

has been proved to exist. At the close of 1907 there were on the

Warden's books over 800 mineral leases, besides some hundreds of

claims and several freeholds. The outcrops throughout the district

have been described by one of the Government Geologists as innumerable

and phenomenally rich. But the district is still in the prospecting

stage, and it is yet too soon to pronounce an opinion as to whether

the deposits generally will live at depth, or of what value they will

be if they do, although it may safely be said that the developments

in the more important mines during the past twelve months have been

distinctly encouraging. Smelting operations are already in progress

at two, if not three, of the principal mining centres of the district,

and a railway extension from Cloncurry 74 miles southward is now

in course of construction. Another Queensland mineral field of

vast extent is the Etheridge. It has an area equal to half that

of Scotland, and the Warden for the field, when he undertakes his

periodical patrol, has an itinerary of about 400 miles.

[Illustration: CHARTERS TOWERS: PLANT'S DAY DAWN]

Passing reference has been made to the sapphire field of Anakie, in

Central Queensland, and to the opal to be found in her trackless West.

As a matter of fact, isolated finds of many kinds of gems besides

these two have been made in widely separated parts of the State, but

as a recognised branch of the mining industry opal and sapphire mining

has for years occupied an important place. In the Anakie field, 190

miles from Rockhampton, on the Central Railway, the existence of

gem-stones was officially reported as early as 1892. Ten years later

the Government Geologist, reporting on these sapphire fields, stated

that "the total distance along which deposits are found ... is

altogether about fifteen miles. Of an area of 400 square miles

examined, fifty square miles contain deposits carrying sapphires of

more or less value." In 1905, another member of the Geological staff

reported that the most important recent development had been the

opening up of a second bed of the sapphire wash at a depth of 25 feet,

and that excellent stones, freer from flaws than those nearer the

surface, were being obtained from the lower deposit. Mining for these

precious stones, many of which are of the most beautiful description,

has been to a considerable extent detrimentally affected by the

difficulty experienced in getting a regular market and what is

considered a fair price for the gems; but, notwithstanding this

drawback, there was a large expansion in the industry during the four

years preceding 1907--the annual production having increased in that

period from L7,000 to L35,000 in value. In 1908, however, there was

a considerable falling off, mainly because miners were not satisfied

with the prices obtainable; but, with an improvement in this respect,

renewed activity on the field, which even now supports a population of

over 1,000 persons, may be looked for.

The opal-bearing country extends over a much wider area than

sapphires. The width of this country is, roughly, about 250 miles,

while in length it extends right from the New South Wales border

half-way up the State in a curve bending towards the South Australian

border. The chief centres of production have been Kynuna (near

Winton), Opalton and Fermoy (in the Longreach district), Eromanga, and

Yowah (near Thargomindah). The Queensland opal is recognised as being

unsurpassed for its brilliance and iridescence, and there is reason to

believe that much more will be found than has yet been unearthed; but

the quest for it is difficult owing to the arid nature and vast extent

of the western plains where it occurs. In good seasons men in those

regions find ready employment on the pastoral stations; in very dry

ones, they cannot prospect for the precious stone, and the result has

been that the industry has fluctuated even more than that of sapphire

mining. The highest point was attained in 1895, when the value of the

opal product reached nearly L33,000. Of late years Queensland has been

blessed with good seasons, and the uncertain occupation of opal

mining has, with many men, given place to the more regular and more

comfortable station life. While the opal, the sapphire, and other

precious stones have been dug from Queensland's earth, her Northern

waters have for years yielded the lustrous pearl, and in 1908

pearl-shell to the value of L71,000 was exported.

Sir William Ramsay, speaking as a scientific authority, lately stated

that the day will come when Great Britain, if she continue to be

dependent on her own coal supplies, will find it difficult not only to

carry on her manufactures but to provide fuel for household purposes.

Well, when that day does come, she can send to Queensland for what

coal she wants. Here there are coal measures in abundance--in the

South, Central, and Northern divisions of the State, and on the

Darling Downs. True, we have not yet done much in the way of

production, but all that is wanted is a market, and coal, both

bituminous and anthracitic, can be dug out of the earth and sent away

in practically unlimited quantities. Of ironstone, also, there is an

abundance, and that, too, in such close proximity to the coal supplies

that when the time arrives for Australia to enter earnestly into the

enterprise of iron and steel manufacture Queensland should play an

important part both in producing the raw material and in preparing the

product for the market.

With only one or two exceptions, all the important mining centres of

Queensland are now connected with the eastern coast by rail, and

those that are not are being rapidly linked up. During the year 1908

thirteen new railways were authorised by Parliament, five of them

to serve mineral districts. Four of these lines are now under

construction; and in addition the railway to the Etheridge field is

completed for two-thirds of its length.

To sum up: Queensland during the half-century of her existence has

produced gold to the value, in round numbers, of over L69,000,000,

and other minerals, coal, and precious stones worth more than

L21,000,000--or an aggregate of L90,000,000. Last year's mineral

production was worth L3,844,000, so that, even at the same rate

of output, in less than three years we shall have topped the

L100,000,000. The number of men obtaining employment in connection

with the industry during 1908 was just upon 21,000--only 4,000 less

than Queensland's total population in 1859. The value of machinery and

plant used for mining and ore reduction purposes throughout the State

is over L2,000,000. The worth of the coal output of the West Moreton

district alone last year (L193,000) was more than the total revenue of

Queensland during the first year of her existence; while the mineral

product of the Herberton district during the same period was nearly

four times as great.

In the space available for this article it has been possible to take

but a cursory view of the mineral progress which has characterised the

first half-century of Queensland's life, but enough has been written

to show that that progress has been remarkable, if not phenomenal. And

who shall say what strides will be made during the next fifty years,

or venture to predict what will be the value of our mineral wealth in

the year 1959? It is a safe rule "not to prophesy till you know," but

even the most timid prophet could hardly hesitate to predict expansion

for Queensland's mining industry. Where there has been so much growth

in the past, and where there is such an unlimited field for greater

growth in the years to come, it would be absurd to suppose that there

will be no further advance. As a matter of fact, many well qualified

to judge do not hesitate to say that the industry is as yet in its

infancy. It has been truly said of gold that "what it is, there

it is"; and what you have to do is to find where it is. When it is

remembered, however, that the prominent hill known as Mount Morgan,

with its millions' worth of golden ore, was within a day's journey

of the populous town of Rockhampton, and remained undiscovered until

1882, although alluvial gold had been found at its base for years

previously and the disappointed miners from Canoona had twenty-three

years before swarmed in its vicinity; when we recollect that only

quite recently nuggets have been found in the streets of some of the

oldest of Victorian mining townships, who shall say what has yet to be

unearthed in the wide expanses of Queensland's bush, a great deal of

which is already known to be "rich with the spoils of Nature"?

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear;"

and the experience of the last half-century amply justifies the belief

that untold millions lie hidden in the earthen depths of Queensland.

[Illustration: GYMPIE: SCOTTISH GYMPIE GOLD MINE]

[Illustration: GYMPIE: No. 1 NORTH ORIENTAL AND GLANMIRE]

CHAPTER V.

OUR ASSET IN ARTESIAN WATER.

Erroneous Judgment of Western Queensland.--Scarcity of Surface

Water.--Water Supply Department.--Discovery of Artesian Water

in New South Wales.--Prospecting in Queensland.--Difficulties

Experienced by Early Borers.--First Artesian Flowing Bore.

--Dr. Jack's First Estimate of Artesian Area.--Revised Figures.

--Number of Bores and Estimated Flow.--Area Capable of being

Irrigated with Artesian Water.--Cost of Boring.--Value of

Artesian Water.--Extent of Intake Beds.--Waste of Water.

--Necessity for Government Control of Wells.--Value of Water

for Irrigation, Consumption, and Motive Power.--Artesian Water

a Great National Asset.

Fifty years ago the white population of Australia, including Tasmania,

scarcely exceeded a million persons. At that time the theory was

generally accepted that only a fringe of the coast south of the

tropic of Capricorn would be found habitable by a British or European

population. The reports of explorers led to the conclusion that the

vast inland area of our continent was an irreclaimable arid desert,

save when, at long and uncertain intervals, it was ravaged by

destructive floods, the water from which, licked up by a fiery sun

or absorbed by a porous subsoil, disappeared from the surface with

marvellous rapidity. A little more than forty years ago squatting

occupation had been pushed towards the interior of the continent

with not only rapid strides, but it was held by many explorers with

a presumptuous boldness that could only be followed by disaster. So

deeply had this conviction been driven into the minds of experienced

men that a distinguished Australian explorer, the late Sir A. C.

Gregory, declared in his late maturity, little more than ten years

ago, that on what is now some of the richest and most productive

country in Western Queensland a bandicoot could not live; and on the

statement being challenged he said he spoke from personal experience

as an explorer after two visits separated by an interval of nine

years. The country more particularly so condemned was the well-known

pastoral run, Wellshot, a little to the south of Longreach, and one of

the largest and finest wool-growing properties in Australia.

It must be frankly conceded that the occupation by flocks and herds

nearly forty years ago of what was then known as the Barcoo and

Thomson country was venturesome to the point of recklessness. Except

in the sandy beds of these rivers there was practically no surface

water of a permanent nature; and the average rainfall was so

inadequate, not to mention its capriciousness, and the ground in many

places so porous, that any attempt to provide artificial water by the

construction of dams or tanks seemed almost tempting Providence. Yet

there arose a persistent belief, afterwards more than justified, that

underneath the arid surface was flowing water in great abundance. The

rainfall, however copious in exceptional seasons, certainly did not

reach the sea, and the hypothesis that great subterranean rivers would

disclose themselves to a systematic search attracted much notice. In

the dry year of 1883 the necessity of an improved water supply if

the country was not to be denuded of stock forced itself upon the

attention of our leading public men. The Premier, the late Sir Thomas

McIlwraith, decided to constitute a Government Hydraulic Department

with a competent engineer at its head. There had previously been

so-called hydraulic engineers, but their work was chiefly confined to

the water supply of a few towns and of the more settled districts on

the coast. But Sir Thomas McIlwraith, as a runholder in the Far West,

realised that nothing but heroic efforts, assisted by the Government,

would save the country from desertion, with appalling loss to its

adventurous occupiers and their flocks and herds. Mr. J. Baillie

Henderson was at the time in the Queensland public service, and the

Premier knew that he had served with distinction as an engineer in

the Water Supply Department of Victoria. That gentleman was therefore

selected to organise a Water Supply Department in Queensland, and on

1st February, 1883, he was gazetted Hydraulic Engineer, an appointment

which he has ever since held with credit to himself and advantage to

the country.[a]

At that time the existence of artesian water in Queensland was no more

than suspected. It had been tapped four years previously in New South

Wales, but the boring appliances were so inadequate as to make the

process tedious and of questionable practicability on an extensive

scale. In Queensland some prospecting work had been done, and in some

places fair supplies of water obtained by sinking ordinary wells.

But in the Far West there was little scope for enterprise in

that direction. Hence some extensive dams were constructed across

watercourses ordinarily dry, but without conspicuous success. For

often the rush of flood waters either carried away the embankments,

or the reservoirs they created quickly silted up, or the porousness of

the subsoil could not be entirely combated by "puddling." Then streams

at times complaisantly abandoned their old channels and formed new

ones, leaving the intended reservoirs high and dry after the most

deluging rains. After a time it was found that better sites than

the beds of main watercourses could be found for dams, and that

the construction of tanks would suffice in many places to provide

sufficient water for a scattered population and the increasing numbers

of live stock, although the expense of this mode of conservation was

great for the limited supply obtained. Evidently, if the Far West

was ever to be completely utilised, its almost illimitable areas of

splendid pastures must be watered by some more effective means.

Attention was at this time attracted to the success of the few

artesian bores in New South Wales, and to the vast scale on which

water had been tapped by that means in the United States of America.

The chief obstacles, however, were the great depth at which artesian

water might be expected to be found, and the utter inadequacy of the

boring machinery then in use in Australia; moreover, the search was

most needed in the areas practically inaccessible by reason of the

absence of surface water. For a considerable time, as is disclosed in

the digest of the Hydraulic Engineer's annual reports reproduced in

Appendix H, little progress could be made.

It was not until October, 1884, in fact--just twenty-five years

ago--that information was obtained of the striking of sub-artesian[b]

water by the Messrs. Bignell at Widgeegoara Station, close to the New

South Wales border. The place was visited by Mr. Henderson, and by him

reported upon encouragingly. In the same month the Treasurer received

a letter from the late Hon. George King, of Gowrie Station, Darling

Downs, directing attention to the "Walking Beam Rig" machine, an

American well-boring apparatus, by the use of which it had been

ascertained that his firm might have saved L4,500 out of the L6,000

spent by it in well-sinking in the Warrego district. The letter being

referred to the Hydraulic Engineer, that officer recommended the

introduction of American bore-sinking machinery, and the engagement of

American skilled drillers who would undertake to give instruction in

the use of the machinery as well as engage in drilling work for the

Government of Queensland. Delays occurred, however, apparently through

the unwillingness of the Government to adopt the advice tendered. It

was not until December, 1885, that Mr. Arnold, an American well-borer,

was despatched to Blackall to sink a bore there. The first attempt

failed, but afterwards water was struck in abundance, though not by

him, or until after the first Queensland flowing well had been sunk by

the Government at Barcaldine in December, 1887.

In April, 1887, the Hydraulic Engineer had visited Thurulgoona

Station, and there found that Mr. Loughead, with the "Canadian Pole

Tool" boring apparatus, had obtained a supply of excellent fresh

artesian water from a depth of 1,009 feet, the flow rising 20 inches

above ground. From that date boring went on apace, and the exploratory

success of the Government encouraged private persons to follow their

lead. There were failures to strike artesian water, of course, both on

the part of the Government and private persons, but on the whole the

results have been such as to add to Queensland occupiable country

equivalent to a great new province in the Far West.

[Illustration]

The map presented herewith shows the area of artesian water-bearing

country in Australia as estimated by Dr. R. L. Jack, formerly

Government Geologist. Since 1893 Queensland has been credited with the

area of 376,832 square miles, this being equal to 56 per cent. of

the estimated total. But that total has since been reduced to 569,000

square miles, and late information shows that the approximate area of

the Queensland artesian basin, as ascertained by scaling off the

most recent map issued by the Hydraulic Engineer, is 372,105 square

miles--4,727 square miles less than the area given in his report for

1893. Yet the revised figures bring the Queensland artesian area up to

65 per cent. of the Australian total. The difference is accounted

for by later information acquired in the field. Of the 372,105 square

miles mentioned the area of 146,430 square miles has been tested and

found to be less or more artesian or sub-artesian. Mr. Henderson

says: "The flows from many of the artesian bores which at one time

or another yielded artesian water have failed, but owing to the

suspension of the hydraulic survey the available data are quite

insufficient to admit of a trustworthy estimate being made of the area

so affected."

[Illustration: FLOWING ARTESIAN WELLS, WESTERN QUEENSLAND]

The total supply of bore water has not been ascertained by actual

measurement except from Government bores. But all possible reports of

reputed flows have been obtained from the owners of private bores, and

the figures cut down to 47 per cent. of the furnished estimates. This

reduction is not an arbitrary one, however, but is the equivalent of

the difference found to exist between the average estimate and the

measured flow of such bores as the Hydraulic Department has been

enabled to test.

Information from the Hydraulic Engineer's office shows that up to the

end of May last there were 716 flowing bores in Queensland, pouring

forth an enormous supply of sparkling water estimated at slightly over

4791/4 million gallons a day, equal to a discharge of 175,000 million

gallons per annum.[c] This flow, if conserved in tanks and pipes,

would furnish a population of nearly 12 millions with 40 gallons of

water per capita a day. It would irrigate 644,366 acres of cultivated

land with 12 inches of water per annum.[d] An area so irrigated,

utilised solely for wheat-growing, would produce, at 20 bushels per

acre, nearly 13 million bushels of grain, which is equal to 28.87 per

cent. of the entire Commonwealth wheat crop for the year 1907-8.

The average Commonwealth yield for the last five years, however, was

611/2 million bushels. The average area under wheat for the same

period was 5,864,114 acres, the average yield for the Commonwealth

therefore being slightly over 101/2 bushels to the acre. As much

wheat is cut for fodder, and as irrigated land should produce a

largely increased crop, 20 bushels per acre for such land seems a

moderate estimate. Moreover, in 1902-3, the Commonwealth crop was

under 121/2 million bushels, or less than one-fifth of the mean

average for the succeeding five years. At the same time the area

of land under crop was in 1902-3 but little below the succeeding

five-year average on an acre of land.[e]

The presumably perpetual daily flow of 4791/4 million gallons of

artesian water--the quantity named being equal to only 47 per cent. of

the reputed flow in the case of unmeasured wells--has cost, so far as

an estimate can be made, L1,873,515. This works out at the average of

L2,616 per flowing bore, supplying 669,369 gallons a day. Calculating

on the basis of 5 per cent., including interest and redemption

payments, the annual charge for this money is equal to L131 per

well, spread over a forty-one years' term, the average cost to each

well-owner being thus L1 for 1,865,000 gallons of water a year. Thus,

although much money has been lost in sinking unsuccessful bores, the

investment has on the whole been amazingly profitable, even allowing

that a further annual charge for maintenance must be added.

It need hardly be said, however, that in practice this enormous

flow of artesian water could not be utilised solely either for human

consumption or for irrigation. Under existing conditions the first

claim upon it may be said to be for the sustenance of live stock, as

the domestic consumption in the region of the flow is comparatively

trifling. And here arises a problem of vast importance. Will this flow

be perpetual, or will it gradually decline until exhaustion of the

sources of supply ultimately takes place? The latter contingency there

seems to be little reason to fear, for the area of the intake beds,

estimated by Dr. R. L. Jack at 5,000 square miles, affords the

assurance that our artesian springs will be constantly replenished by

the rainfall over that large extent of country. Yet, when the existing

number of artesian wells has been doubled or trebled, it seems not

improbable that many of them will become sub-artesian, and only

yield their fertilising streams in response to pumping-power. On this

question, however, expert opinions widely differ. But, taking the

experience of America and other countries in which artesian springs

have been tapped, it may be said that the flow steadily decreases as

the number of bores multiplies.

The Hydraulic Engineer estimates that about two-thirds of the artesian

water at present tapped flows to waste. As to the definition of

"waste," however, there is sharp conflict of opinion. A pastoralist

who distributes a supply of a million gallons of bore water a day

by replenishing dry creeks or constructing artificial channels may

contend that in his case the loss by evaporation or soakage is not

waste, but an expenditure of water necessary to make his artesian

well serve its desired purposes. To control and distribute by means of

reticulating pipes the product of all Queensland's flowing bores would

involve a heavy investment of capital, and one not warranted by

the existing population in the artesian area--a population mainly

dependent upon sheep-raising and wool-growing for subsistence. But the

time may come when it will be deemed indispensable that flowing

wells should be brought under Government control, or their product

be subject, as in the case of surface water, to riparian rights.

The pastoralist who has spent several thousand pounds in sinking a

successful bore not unnaturally claims the water issuing from it as

his own property; but public policy may require that after diverting

so much as may be requisite for his reasonable individual uses the

remainder shall be made available for the occupiers of neighbouring

lands.

The information that little more than one-half the area of the

artesian basin in Queensland has yet been explored is in some respects

disappointing, but it is reassuring in others. For if the unexplored

country yields as much water per square mile of surface as is now

pouring forth from the wells on the tested area--which is not yet

fully developed--the total daily yield will ultimately approach 1,000

millions of gallons. Never, according to official information, was

bore-sinking more active than it is during the current year, and

the thoughtful reader will sympathise with Mr. Henderson's repeated

expression of regret that want of money some years ago compelled the

department to discontinue both exploration on scientific lines and the

periodical measurement of all artesian flows. For with careful surveys

of the entire water-bearing area much capital might be saved by

teaching where copious springs might or might not be expected to be

met with; while with measurement and registration of all flows the

question as to the perpetuity or the contrary of the supply would be

placed beyond controversy. In that case legislation could be initiated

with confidence, and the public interest safeguarded with the least

possible disturbance of private interests.

An important consideration in connection with the artesian area

is that the land watered by bores is as a rule more than commonly

fertile. Its pastures produce some of the most nutritious natural

grasses and herbage found on the face of the earth; and, what is of

immense significance, they are grasses and herbage that either would

not live or would deteriorate under a tropical sun, with a rainfall

equal to the coastal average. Thus it may be argued that artesian bore

water--at any rate, when so free from mineral impregnation as to be

unquestionably potable--is more valuable, gallon for gallon, than the

supply direct from the clouds.

In several of his numerous reports the Hydraulic Engineer makes

reference to the subject of irrigation by means of artesian water.

It is certain that the water from some bores, while useful for live

stock, is not fit for either domestic use or for irrigation. The

Hydraulic Department many years ago began what was intended to be

a systematic analysis of bore water with the view to providing an

official record that would be highly useful for public purposes. But

in one case at least water pronounced by the Government Analyst as

useless even for stock was highly esteemed on the run whence it was

obtained; and evidently much has yet to be learned as to the value of

subterranean waters not regarded as potable by scientific standards.

Some of the most copiously flowing bores, however, discharge water

of unexceptional quality, whether for domestic use, manufacturing

purposes, or irrigation. The Hydraulic Engineer doubts, having regard

to the immense quantity of water required for irrigation, whether it

will ever be found useful for that purpose in so far as the greater

agricultural industries are concerned; but for intense cultivation

around the homestead he thinks bore water might well be utilised. In

some cases it would be in sufficiently large supply for the raising of

green fodder for stud stock--perhaps even for protection against minor

local droughts. An irrigated crop needs three or four waterings of

3 inches each, and as each inch means 22,614 gallons, the quantity

required for a crop, with four waterings, would be 271,368 gallons per

acre; so that a cultivation plot of 20 or 30 acres would absorb from

5 to 8 million gallons a year, according to the seasons, the nature of

the soil, or the soakage.

While doubtful as to the suitability of bore water for irrigation on

a large scale, Mr. Henderson strongly advocates its being applied to

machinery of small power. Many years ago he directed attention in

one of his annual reports to the extensive use of water power

in competition with steam in certain parts of America; and it is

satisfactory to note that in some inland towns of Queensland the

American example has been followed. In quite a number of towns the

public water service is artesian, and in a few it is the motive power

of electric lighting systems. The information that the flowing wells

of Queensland are discharging daily 320 million gallons of water "to

waste" indicates that when population in the artesian area becomes

more dense bore power will become an invaluable aid in economic

manufacture. The water so harnessed would not be wasted, as every

gallon would still be available for human or animal consumption.

[Illustration: ABERDARE COLLIERY, IPSWICH DISTRICT]

The money value of the water annually discharged from the flowing

bores of Queensland runs into stupendous figures, even at the rate

of 6d. per 1,000 gallons. At that rate its annual value would exceed

41/4 millions sterling. Capitalise this sum at 4 per cent., and the

artesian water flow of Queensland becomes worth upwards of 1091/4

millions sterling, less, of course, the cost of maintenance and

supervision similarly capitalised. And this colossal endowment is the

result during the last quarter of a century of a total expenditure of

less than 2 millions sterling. Granting that to utilise all this water

already under pressure would mean a very large additional expenditure

in tanks, aqueducts, and pipes, that expenditure may be calculated in

advance to a minute fraction in every case, and it would of course

be disbursed gradually as the demand for the delivery of water

under pressure developed with the increase of population and the

multiplication of industries. It must be apparent, therefore, that any

needful public expenditure to ascertain whether the flow diminishes or

increases as the years go on, and to prevent waste if waste there

be, is more than justified. Indeed, should any great public loss be

suffered for want of State control of this life-giving national asset,

it might be difficult for Parliament entirely to clear itself from

blame if charged with neglecting the reiterated advice of its own

responsible officer in this respect.

[Footnote a: For digest of Hydraulic Engineer's reports, 1883 to

1908 inclusive, see Appendix H, post.]

[Footnote b: "Sub-artesian" is a term applied when the water in

a bore rises to or near the surface, but does not automatically

flow along it.]

[Footnote c: It will be seen on reference to Appendix H that

since the Hydraulic Engineer supplied his figures a number of

additional flowing bores have been sunk, and have substantially

increased the aggregate flow, although, the figures not having

been officially verified, the aggregate flow remains in the

text as from the 716 bores recognised by the Hydraulic Engineer.]

[Footnote d: The quantity of water deposited on an acre of land

by an inch of rain is 22,614 gallons.]

[Footnote e: See "Commonwealth Year Book," 1909, page 382.]

APPENDICES.

APPENDIX A.

READJUSTMENT OF WESTERN BOUNDARY.

The following summary of correspondence between Governor Bowen and the

Secretary of State for the Colonies gives information in addition to

that furnished in "The Subdivision of Australia," page xiv., relating

to the readjustment of the Queensland western boundary:--

On 30th September, 1860, Sir George Bowen--in transmitting an Address

passed by the Queensland Legislature asking that "the western boundary

of Queensland should be declared to extend at least so far as to

include the Gulf of Carpentaria, without which declaration the

Legislature would not feel authorised in taking steps towards the

development of the colony in that direction"--referred to the opinion

of Mr. A. C. Gregory, then Surveyor-General, that "a boundary at the

141st meridian would just cut off from Queensland the greater portion

of the only territory available for settlement, _i.e._, the Plains of

Promise, and the only safe harbour, _i.e._, Investigator Road, in the

Gulf of Carpentaria." The Governor added that until receipt of the

Duke of Newcastle's despatch of 21st October, 1859, enclosing the

opinion of the Law Officers of the Crown, the general belief here was

that the western boundary of Queensland was identical with the eastern

boundary of Western Australia, that is, with the 129th degree of east

longitude. But now the Law Officers had declared expressly that the

141st meridian was the western boundary, he urged that the prayer

of the local Legislature should be complied with by extending the

boundary to the 138th meridian of east longitude.

On 8th December, 1860, Governor Bowen again wrote to the Colonial

Office urging that the boundary should be extended, and contending

that the question was of Imperial as well as colonial importance.

Replying on 26th February, 1861, the Duke of Newcastle said that South

Australia had asked for the territory desired by Queensland, and that

certain gentlemen in Victoria were desirous of forming a settlement

on the northern coast of Australia. His Grace added that there were

doubts whether the Government had the power to annex the territory as

desired, and if these doubts had any foundation he would submit a Bill

to the Imperial Parliament to remove them. In September, 1861, Sir

George Bowen again urged the annexation of the territory, remarking

that "Queensland can gain little but trouble and expense from

undertaking the management and protection of any future settlement on

the Gulf of Carpentaria; for it is certain that so soon as it becomes

self-supporting it will demand to be erected into a separate colony."

On 14th December following the Duke of Newcastle wrote to the Governor

stating that he had "no objection to the proposal that this territory

should be temporarily annexed to the colony of Queensland, and

accordingly that Letters Patent would be issued for giving effect to

this arrangement under 24 and 25 Vict., cap. 44." But his Grace warned

the Governor that the annexation would probably be revoked when

the growth of population or other circumstances rendered separation

desirable in the interests of the new territory. He closed with these

words--"I am not prepared to abandon definitely, on the part of

Her Majesty's Government, the power to deal with districts not yet

settled, as the wishes or convenience of the future settlers may

hereafter require."

APPENDIX B.

THE FIRST PARLIAMENT.

(First Session, 1860.)

THE GOVERNOR:

His Excellency Sir George Ferguson Bowen, K.C.M.G.

THE MINISTRY:

_With Seats in the Legislative Assembly._

Colonial Secretary--The Honourable Robert George Wyndham Herbert.

Attorney-General--The Honourable Ratcliffe Pring.

Colonial Treasurer--The Honourable Robert Ramsay Mackenzie.

_With Seats in the Legislative Council._

Minister without Portfolio--The Honourable Maurice Charles O'Connell.[a]

Minister without Portfolio--The Honourable John James Galloway.[b]

MEMBERS OF THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL (15).

President--The Honourable Sir Charles Nicholson.[c]

Chairman of Committees--The Honourable Daniel Foley Roberts.[d]