A PARADISE OF FRUIT
Who in England does not know the Tasmanian apple--rosy, juicy, and
expensive--appearing about Easter, and continuing until the English
orchards yield their own annual output? A foreign and delectable fruit
is this apple, welcome enough in the off season “at home.”
I am writing in the very heart of Tasmania, in the midst of a wonderful
valley, covered with huge crops of hops and apples. We have done two
days of motoring, and in the aggregate have covered many thousands of
acres, yet never have we lost the view of immense orchards and hop
gardens. From a score of heights we have gazed upon plains and valleys
unsurpassed for loveliness and fertility. We are in the true home of
the apple.
The house in which we are now staying is a roomy, old-fashioned
farm-house, built after the English pattern, with certain Tasmanian
features added, the whole being surrounded by an old-world garden, such
as is seen in small English country towns or large English villages.
We are playing at an English holiday, and cheating ourselves with
the sweet illusion that the railway yonder really goes to London.
Everything here is so English that it would occasion no surprise to
discover that this old-fashioned railway is the branch of an English
trunk line to London.
To this place we came from Glenorchy, where Dr. Benjafield, the Medical
Officer of Health, has one of the finest pear orchards in the southern
hemisphere. Two better centres of the apple and pear industry than
Glenorchy and Bushy Park it would be impossible to find. All that can
be known about the cultivation of the apple and the pear we learn
here, from the very beginning of the process when the bush is cleared
and fruit saplings are planted until the moment of packing for the
English market. Roaming over these enormous expanses of cultivated
land, it appears almost incredible that this fertility is the work of a
comparatively few years. In the Old Land orchards very frequently have
a history. Here there has been no time for making history. A few years
ago this country was covered with a stubborn scrub, surmounted with
the giant eucalyptus. To-day it has been brought under the dominion of
man, to whom it yields a marvellous profit. A system of almost perfect
irrigation has converted land which aforetime was worth ten shillings
an acre into fertile orchards which to-day could not be bought for two
or three hundred times that amount.
No fewer than 200 varieties of apples are grown in Tasmania, including
all the best English fruit, such as Ribstons, Cox’s Orange, and the
like. As to pears, one grower alone cultivates seventy varieties,
and he boasts, with pardonable pride, that his fruit has graced the
table of King George. An afternoon spent on his estate was a perfect
revelation of the possibilities of the soil. We stood in the centre
of one of the largest orchards I have ever seen, and gazed along
avenues of fruit trees extending half a mile in length. Pear and apple
trees occupied the ground, the former predominating. The fruit was so
plentiful that in scores of cases it completely hid the wood of the
branches from view. Enormous branches, bending under their healthful
weight, literally touched the ground, and here and there was the
spectacle of branches broken in twain by reason of the excess of fruit
they bore. Some of the pears weigh eighteen ounces when fully ripe,
and Dr. Benjafield assured me that they fetched as much as a shilling
each, wholesale, in Covent Garden Market. In this orchard, one of five
owned by him, were no fewer than 5,000 pear trees. Had the camera been
able faithfully to depict the fruit-laden trees, I would have sent
some photographs home; but, unfortunately, the protruding fruit is
not so distinct from the leaf in a photograph as to give the desired
impression.
Orcharding means fortune for the majority of growers if they will
attend to their business, cleaning their ground, pruning the trees, and
spraying against the dreaded codling-moth. One grower openly admitted
that, as a professional man, he had earned nearly £2,000 a year, but
the fruit industry paid him better. Year by year the output increases.
One estate of 290 acres that I visited is only five years old, and yet
in that short time it has yielded 80,000 cases of apples, each case
containing from forty to fifty pounds weight of fruit. The ambition of
Tasmania is to become the chief fruit-producing area of the southern
hemisphere. This year it is likely that a million cases will be shipped
from Hobart to Great Britain, South America, and Europe.
These facts and figures show what a change is passing over an island
which a century ago was the haunt of the most degraded aboriginal
known. And how easily it might have been Dutch or French instead of
British! Pride of the flag is most naturally engendered at the view of
these wonderful conquests of Britain’s mind and toil.
Orcharding in Tasmania--and, for that matter, in Australia also--offers
certain hints which the British “at home” would do well to heed. The
Australian and the Tasmanian understand the art of making their fruit
trees produce the maximum of yield with the minimum of labour and
expenditure. It is true that the unparalleled climate has much to do
with their success. But I was a little astonished to learn that poor
soil--third-rate soil--produces the best results in apples. The secret
lies, not in the richness of the soil, but in careful irrigation and in
careful pruning. The trees are what in England would be called dwarfs.
They rarely exceed eight or ten feet in height. They are thus dwarfed
so as to dispense with the loss of time in the use of ladders. All the
fruit can be picked by men standing on the earth or upon small boxes,
or by boys who leap into the fork of the tree, and from that elevation
gather the fruit. This method makes an astonishing difference to the
time and expense of plucking.
Not only are the trees deliberately dwarfed, but they are so pruned
that all the fruit is thrown into six or seven large branches, which
are thick with apples, growing as low down as a foot from the ground.
Thus, by the cutting away of all inner branches, light and air gain
access to every part of the tree. It is a simple method of cultivation,
but it is highly successful. In addition to this, the growers practise
what is called “summer pruning.” Two or three weeks before the apples
are gathered all superfluous small branches and leaves are removed,
so that the sun can reach every apple on the tree. The appearance of
apple trees developed on this system is rather curious at first, and it
contrasts unfavourably with the large and bushy aspect of trees in an
English orchard; but, judged by results, the Tasmanian and Australian
system is far preferable to the English system.
As I write, the picking season is in full swing. We are following the
entire process. Swarms of men and boys invade the orchards, filling
their bags with the golden fruit. But oh! the holocaust! It is enough
to make a man weep to see the thousands of “rejects.” The tiniest
speck in an apple, a little sunburn, or the merest suspicion of the
codling-moth is sufficient to cause the fruit to be flung upon the
ground. Only sound fruit, absolutely perfect, is allowed to be packed.
Lynx-eyed inspectors open each case of apples upon the wharf, and
defect in a single apple means condemnation for the entire case. In
the packing-sheds each apple is wrapped in a separate piece of paper
before being committed to the case. Clever workers can earn as much as
ten or eleven shillings a day by wrapping up the fruit. They are paid a
penny a case of, say, one hundred and fifty or sixty apples. Think of
the rapid manipulation of the fingers which, at this rate of work, can
earn eleven shillings a day! It means the handling of twenty thousand
separate pieces of fruit.
The healthfulness of the orchardist’s life is apparent to all. Dr.
Benjafield, in presenting his annual report as Medical Officer of
Glenorchy, declared that the health of the municipality, a district
of one hundred square miles, had established for the year a world’s
record--not a death from preventible infectious disease; one case
only of true consumption; the death-rate nearly down to zero. Dr.
Benjafield is a medico trained in London and Edinburgh, and he has been
in Tasmania for thirty years. Besides being Medical Officer of Health,
he is an orchardist on his own account, and he speaks of health in the
orchard thus:
“I have seen for myself the great things which are included in life
in a garden. I have seen many babies born in the district, but never
a mother died. I have seen rollicking, toothless, fat babies munching
away at red apples, or stuffing in raw strawberries, and their mothers
just laughed at the horror on my face; and when the thermometer stands
at 90 degrees or 100 degrees sunstroke never troubles them.”
The much-lauded “simple life” is the general life here--“early to bed
and early to rise”--and then the whole day in the sunshine--pruning
in winter, digging and ploughing in spring, weeding and spraying, in
big apple and pear orchards, and picking small fruits in early summer,
and later on the harder fruits as they come in, until the great autumn
gatherings close the season.
There is no hustle here--a great thing that in the battle of life. Each
worker has own row to hoe, and pretty well his own time that he takes
to do it.
In the next chapter I shall say something of the orchards as a
desirable investment for English workers.
Meanwhile, let us follow the fruit to the end. When all the sound fruit
has been exported there remain millions of “rejects,” which are sent
to the jam factory and there converted to profitable uses. At Hobart
we inspected a large factory where every kind of jam is made and many
kinds of fruit preserved. The process is wonderfully clean, most of
the fruit being untouched by hand. A great deal of “pulp” is sent to
England, to be there treated and converted into preserve, but the jam
itself is not exported, because English people have a great prejudice
against tinned preserves. This is a pity, and the prejudice is
entirely without foundation since the introduction of enamelled tins.
If this prejudice could only be overcome, Englishmen might taste a new
sensation at present denied to most of them--peach jam. Australia and
Tasmania can supply this delicacy, but not until the folk at home look
with kindlier eyes upon the despised “tin.”