COST OF LIVING UP-COUNTRY.

Evening Star, Issue 3674, 1 December 1874, Page 3

COST OF LIVING UP-COUNTRY.

(From the Mount Ida Chronicle )

' The price of provisions at the present time is of very serious moment to the prosperity of tho up-country districts. It causes us to look forward with very serious apprehensions to the year that is before us. Miners—the only producers we have—are not making L2 per week throughout the year. Wages are usually L 3. but the employment, as is well known, is not constant, even if there were no broken time to be deducted while under engagement. Now, what are the prices of necessary provisions ? These may be taken to be, in Naseby Flour, Ll per lOOlbs, or nearly 2£d per lb ; oatmeal. L2 per lOOlbs, or nearly 5d per lb ; potatoes, hardly procurable at 14s per cwt; bacon, Is 3d to Is fid perlb; while meat runs from 5d to lOd per lb, according to quality. Firing cannot in any way be done without, aud is dear in proportion to the distance brought. Now, it may he fairly taken as afoot, that, witlumthelpingadjuncts, such as cattle or poultry, a family whose head is only making 12 per week cannot, at such prices, pay its way at the stores We are told, till we are sick at the reiterated falsehood that there is no market for produce but for the supply of roadside wants, and yet oatmeal is 1.40 per ton, and hardly any produce is grown in the district, while over L 2.000 a-year is paid away as toll to the roads by Naseby alone ; while, too, it is an axiom dating back to the Pilgrim Fathers of America, and more recently strikingly developed in Mormon Utah, that settlement creates its own market. So keen, indeed, are settlers to go on to land that no less than fourteen intending applicants travelled lately to Hyde, we are told, to see a small block of 1,000 acres jast selected, but not surveyed—the only present hope of a market being the ap-country one.