FARMING IN AUSTRALIA.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 345, 15 March 1911, Page 2

FARMING IN AUSTRALIA.

No one can claim that the Commonwealth is fertile from ocean to ocean. It is a land with a vast amoant of waste, but it contains so much that is good that the desert portions can be acknowledged with frankness by its most uncompromising patriots. Round the long seaboard, washed by three oceans, there is fertile country enough to carry ten millions of people and to treat them handsomely. We reckon in Australia that farming settlement is profitable on country with an average rainfall in excess of about 18in. This does not mean that all the land in Australia blessed with this amount of moisture is to become the home of a farming people. Of the continent of 2,974,851 square miles, some 827,000 square miles, or 529,000,000 acres, have a rainfall of above 20in. But of this a great area must be classed as mountainous and rough and otherwise unsuited to agriculture. Against that loss, however, one may legitimately take in big tracts of country of lower rainfall lying close to watercourses, and so destined sooner or later to be cultivated with the aid of irrigation. Consider that the agricultural area of Canada is estimated at 250,000,000 acres, and that the total area of France with its forty millions of peoplei, is 207,218 square miles, and of Spain with its twenty millions, 196,000 square miles, and it will not be denied that Australia has some big population possibilities.—"Westminster Gazette."