QUEENSLAND
Most travellers from our hemisphere first set foot on the Australian
continent at Sydney, the biggest seaport of the country and the seventh
city in size in the whole British Empire. I first stepped out upon its
mainland at Brisbane, which lies five hundred miles north of Sydney and
is the capital of the state of Queensland.
In coming down the coast from Thursday Island and Torres Strait I had
one of the wonder trips of the world, for my way lay inside the Great
Barrier Reef.
Imagine a chain of coral as long as from New Orleans to Chicago. Let
the chain be composed now of atolls, great coral walls encircling
lagoons, now of long coral ridges, and now of gardens of the beautiful
red, white, and pink flowers fashioned by these insects of the seas.
Such is the Great Barrier Reef, which extends along the whole eastern
coast of Australia northward to Torres Strait. For the most part it is
only from five to fifteen miles from the mainland although in one place
it is a hundred miles off shore. At times we were close to the coast,
and again were moving along near huge rings of coral that seemed to
float on the green sea. Some of the atolls had vegetation upon them,
their round basins being circled with coconut trees, while others, seen
only at low tide, were stony and bare.
The air was wonderfully clear and the sky a heavenly blue. The few
clouds made big patches of dark blue velvet on the dreary gray of the
Australian mountains. The sea was as smooth as a mill pond. We were
feeling our way along through a wide canal, one side of which was
walled with the cliffs of Australia and the other by this masonry of
countless millions of coral polyps. Our steamer had to go cautiously,
for under the smooth waters were treacherous spurs and peaks of coral
ready to rip holes in her side. Our captain kept a sharp lookout for
brown waters, which mean bars, or green, which indicate coral, and
steered a course through the deep blue of the safe passage. Among
navigators the shallows between Cape York and New Guinea have the
reputation of being the worst waters in the world. Some of the ship
captains boast that they can smell the coral in the dark, just as those
of our transatlantic liners declare that they can smell the ice of the
bergs that drift down from the North.
Such cautious sailing began to get on the nerves of some of the
passengers and I think all of us were glad when our steamer turned into
Moreton Bay, the outer harbour of Brisbane. We approached a low shore
of sandy dunes and beaches rising gradually into rolling hills thick
with trees. Slowly we entered the mouth of the wide Brisbane River, up
which we travelled for several hours. As our steamer went on through
the murky water, we could look over the side and see masses of jelly
fish, transparent mushrooms of bright violet, tossed this way and that
by the waves from the ship. The banks were low and covered with bushes.
Along the way there were meat-freezing plants, each surrounded by
little houses roofed with galvanized iron, the homes of the workmen.
As we kept on, the country on each side of the river became more
hilly, and when we reached Brisbane I found it a place of as many
gulleys as Kansas City. Most of the town lies on the right bank of the
river. There are many pretty villas, and rising high above them is the
Queensland Parliament House.
After a lenient examination by the customs officials, I drove to my
hotel through streets not unlike those of an American town. They were
paved with wood instead of brick or asphalt. The stores reminded me of
ours at home, and the size of the buildings surprised me.
Brisbane, the capital of the second largest of the six states of
Australia, has more than two hundred thousand people, and is the fourth
city in size on the continent. During the last half century it has had
a phenomenal growth. Less than seventy-five years ago it was taken away
from the neighbouring colony of New South Wales and became the capital
of Queensland. At first it grew but slowly, for it was handicapped by
having been the site of the Moreton Bay Settlement, a colony for the
worst of the convicts sent over from England. When it began to get
on its feet a terrible flood swept away so many of the houses in the
low-lying sections that it was believed the town would never recover.
Yet it took a new lease of life, and to-day it is hard to realize that,
fifty years ago, it was only a village with less than one thousand
inhabitants.
The public buildings were planned with an eye to the needs of the
future. The State Treasury would do credit to our own capital at
Washington. The Law Courts cost nearly two hundred thousand dollars,
and the Parliament Building half a million. In George Street is a
splendid palace which houses the Lands Office, and the Public Library
is a striking piece of Italian architecture. On a steep cliff above the
big-domed custom house rises the Cathedral of St. John, considered the
finest Gothic structure in all Australasia.
Talking with the Queenslanders it is easy to see that they think
theirs is the coming state of Australia. They say the good lands
of Victoria have long since been taken up, that New South Wales is
fairly well developed, and that such large areas of South Australia
and West Australia are desert that those states can never support a
great population. Queensland has two slogans: One claims that it is “a
paradise for willing workers,” and the other that it is “the richest
unpeopled country in the world.” The state has vast tracts of arid
land, which it expects to reclaim by artesian wells. It has already
redeemed from the desert a country more than twice as large as the
state of New York, having discovered that most of the great area beyond
the coastal range is underlaid with subterranean lakes and streams,
which will furnish water for stock. The cultivated acreage is growing
every year. Enough pastures for seventeen million sheep are now in
use, and the state has already nearly twice as many sheep as any other
division of Australia.
Queensland might be called “The Newest England” of these British south
lands. It is a principality in itself. It comprises the northeastern
quarter of the Australian continent; from north to south it is as long
as from Washington to Omaha, and from east to west about as wide as
from Washington to Chicago. It is three times as big as France, and
twelve times the size of England and Wales.
The upper half of Queensland is not far from the Equator and raises
cotton, sugar, tobacco, and all sorts of tropical fruits. Bananas do
so well that one of its nicknames is the “Banana State.” Scrub lands
cleared at a cost of about ten dollars an acre can be planted without
ploughing and will produce fruit in a twelvemonth. Fifteen tons of
pineapples to the acre is not an unusual crop, and pines weighing from
fourteen to sixteen pounds have been grown. The factories for canning
this fruit that have been started with the aid of the government may
some day compete with the great pineapple canneries of Hawaii.
A great advantage of the fruit-growing business in Australia, as
in South America, is the difference in seasons in the Northern and
Southern hemispheres. Being south of the Equator, the fruits ripen at
a time of year when European and North American markets offer the best
prices, and refrigeration and fast boats are already landing Queensland
fruits on our winter tables.
Australia usually raises enough sugar to supply her own needs, and
ninety per cent of her crop is produced in tropical Queensland.
Sugar cane was first grown here about 1865, and in the early days
the plantations were worked with coloured labour brought in from the
South Sea islands. Later on it was decided to send the “blacks” home,
and keep the resources of the state for white men exclusively. From
the standpoint of the growers, this was a real sacrifice, and the
Commonwealth government is now doing everything possible to stimulate
sugar production. At one time it paid bonuses on sugar produced by
white men, but these have been given up. Now the government buys the
entire crop outright and controls its refining and sale. The cane
is crushed in Queensland, but is refined by the big Colonial Sugar
Refining Company in Melbourne and Sydney. Under the government
monopoly the consumer pays about twelve cents a pound. Importation of
sugar by private individuals or companies is forbidden, and whenever
the Queensland crop falls below three hundred thousand tons the
government imports enough to meet the requirements.
[Illustration: Australia has her sugar bowl in Queensland, which
produces nearly enough cane to supply the entire population. It is one
of the few places in the world where the crop is grown without coloured
labour.]
[Illustration: When it is snowing in New York, the Queensland fruit
grower is gathering his pineapples. They are raised on land leased from
the government with the privilege of purchase on easy terms.]
[Illustration: On the elevated sandstone plains of interior Queensland
grows the queer bottle tree. One’s general impression of Australian
forests is their total unlikeness to anything elsewhere.]
In the southern part of the state are the Darling Downs, four million
acres of the richest soil on the continent. Here the average rainfall
is more than thirty inches a year, and almost everywhere artesian water
may be had within a few feet of the surface. Since they were first
settled in 1840 the Downs have been the home of prosperity. To-day they
roll away in orchards and green fields, dotted here and there with
herds of fat dairy cattle, and checkered with chocolate squares of
ploughed lands. I am told that some of the soil is too rich to raise
wheat until it has been farmed a few years. In some places it produces
one hundred and ten bushels of corn to the acre, and on a number of
farms two crops are raised every year. A great deal of money is made in
alfalfa, which grows very rank. Often as many as nine crops are cut in
one year, each yielding from one to two tons per acre. On the best land
it is not uncommon for a man to get a hundred dollars per acre annually
out of alfalfa. As a general thing the farming is carelessly done, and
but little fertilizer is used. The seeds are merely sown and the crop
is reaped.
The principal city on the Downs is Toowoomba, two hundred miles west
of Brisbane and two thousand feet above sea level. It serves as a
playground and health resort for the people of Brisbane and elsewhere
in the hot lowlands. Throughout the year the climate is temperate and
bracing, and in June and July, the coolest months of the year, there
are often frosty mornings here and fires are welcome at night.
Toowoomba is also the unofficial capital of the rich farming district
of the Downs. Its streets are generally full of men who have ridden in
from the country to talk sheep, wool, grapes, wheat, or timber, or to
seek amusement after their hard work in the fields. Its pretty homes
are surrounded by gardens of English flowers and hawthorne hedges
and rows of weeping willow trees. I have seen many weeping willows
along the streams of Australia, and the people say that all are the
descendants of slips brought from the island of St. Helena. In the old
days ships bound for Australia used to stop for water at the place of
Napoleon’s exile and the outgoing colonists provided themselves with
willow cuttings to be planted in their new homes.
Queensland’s great need is more people. In this huge state, capable of
supporting a population of many millions, there are less than eight
hundred thousand, or only about one person to every square mile. I have
before me an advertisement of the Acting-Registrar General declaring
that the two necessities of the state are “increased production and
increased population” and offering inducements in the way of cheap
lands on easy terms to “the industrious in every walk of life.”
Throughout Australia land transfers are made under what is called the
Torrens Title, a system which has spread to Canada, to England, and to
other countries of Europe, and has been adopted by the United States
for the Philippines and Hawaii. Ohio also has adopted it, and others of
our states are using it in modified forms. By this system the landowner
registers his property with the land office, receiving a duplicate
certificate of title. If later he wishes to sell he hands over the
certificate to the purchaser, who has the sale registered at the land
office, where the facts of the transaction are entered on the original
certificate. If the owner puts a mortgage on the property the terms are
recorded with the Registrar. The certificate therefore always contains
the name of the owner, a description of the land, and a statement of
all liens and encumbrances. No title searching is necessary, and by
the payment of a small fee at the Registrar’s office, anybody can find
out all about a given piece of land. The Torrens System and the secret
ballot are two big ideas that we owe to our Australian cousins.
For many years a thorn in the flesh of the small farmers and workingmen
of Queensland was the fact that, by special legislation, big lease
holders of the public lands paid lower rents per acre than the holders
of small tracts. The Land Act Bill of 1915, framed to remedy this
condition, was passed by the lower house of the state Parliament
but was rejected by the upper chamber, or Legislative Council. The
Council was at that time composed of thirty-seven members appointed
nominally by the Crown, but really by the Queensland Prime Minister
and his Cabinet. They could hold office for life, and no limit was
placed on their number. As constituted in 1915, the Council had
only two representatives of labour and the rest of its members were
conservatives, many of them moneyed men determined to guard their
own interests. On the other hand, the seventy-two members of the
Legislative Assembly are elected by the people for three-year terms.
The Land Act Bill was passed by the next Assembly and again rejected
by the Council. Then the government stepped in to see that the will
of the people was carried out. It appointed enough new members known
to favour the act to swamp the conservatives in the Council, and the
bill at once became law. So enlarged, the Council, with its majority
in absolute accord with that in the lower house, became a mere rubber
stamp for the legislation passed by the Assembly, and even approved the
bill ending its own existence.
The government of Queensland is sometimes criticized as a patriarchal
institution for coddling the people. Both town and country make all
sorts of demands on it to serve their interests. They tell a story of
one official who, exasperated by a deputation of farmers, burst out
with this:
“You ask the government to do everything. I am surprised that you do
not demand that we furnish milk for your babies.”
[Illustration: Queensland, the northern half of which lies just south
of the Equator, is sometimes called the “Banana State,” because of the
success of settlers in growing that fruit in the newly cleared lands.]
[Illustration: The farmer who owned the hill now known as Mount Morgan
sold it to prospectors for five dollars an acre. It has since yielded
gold worth $125,000,000 besides vast quantities of copper.]
[Illustration: In the Anakie gold fields of western Queensland mining
sapphires is a well established industry, with an output worth about
one hundred thousand dollars a year. The lemon or orange tinted stones
are the most prized.]