DROUGHT TIMES

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2340, 23 December 1914, Page 6

DROUGHT TIMES

' AUSTRALIA IN THE THROES. Mr. Reginald Roberts, the opera&fl artist, who arrived from Sydney yesterday, recently toured' the dronghtstricken districts of New South Wales, and tells of the struggle the man on the land is liaving at the present time. In the grain-growing districts round Tamworth, Inverell, and Armidale, the havoc wrought by the drought was very marked. Where in normal seasons the crops were as a sea of yellow gold, standing between three and four feet high, there were thin patches of stunted burnt-up wheat and oats not more than eighteen inches high, and between these miserable growths were hundreds of acres of bare earth, powdery dry. Further inland still round about Gunnedah and Narrabri, the country was as bare of herbage as a city street, and the farmers were having a terrible time. Since he was tlicro rain had fallen, but it had come too late to do what standing crops there were any good. The situation in Victoria and South Australia was infinitely worse than in Now South Wales. So bad were the conditions that they wore advised not to tour those States as the outlook was hopeless. Adslaido was suffering acutely from a shortage of water. People staying in the hotels were not permitted to take baths, and each nodroom jug was only half-filled every morning. Such conditions woTe extremely unfortunato this year of all years, owing to the large demand the war had occasioned for grain of all kinds.