UP THE COUNTRY IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 146, 20 June 1872, Page 4

UP THE COUNTRY IN SOUTH AUSTR A L I A.

(From a correspondent of the Lyttelton Times.) Adelaide, May 15. The Summer is well over at last I am pleased to say, and the pleasant crackle of the cheerful evening fire is heard in every home. The fallen leaves of fig, and apricot, almond, and vine, lie strewn about the garden paths, or wandering hither and thither like poor houseless street Arabs, made to move on by that boisterous policeman, the wind. The air is keen, and clear, and pleasant, the sombre brown of the burnt-up pasture lands is giving place to delicate tints of green here and there, and on the crowns of the high downs behind the. town, which have been the first to catch the passing showers aud coo) breezes, the grass is growing green and luscious. The myriad . insect pe&ts that vexed I 'us in the summer have passed away with the hot winds ; the clouds of locusts thousands upon thousands travelling day after day, from north to south, and devouring every green thing that came in thei^ way, are ho longer a source of amazement. No. possible exaggeration of language can give any definite idea of the swarms of these destroyers, which day after day, for upwards of a week, passed over the city 'of Adelaide. They were something like large brown grasshoppers, but with a strength of wing that was simply wonderful ; looking upwards aB far the eye could distinguish, you could see their tiny wings glistening In the sun ; and a gentleman who had been on the top of the Post-office tower informed me that even from this altitude they could be seen in a compact mass high up above him. We heard sad accounts of the mischief they had done in the cornfields up north, of their having stripped the leaves off the she-oak trees, and that the unfortunate marketgardeners, in the hills, were almost beside themselves. A rumor was current that . millions of them (the locusts, not the gardeners) were drowned in the reservoir, which happily proved untrue; and it was stated for a fact that the fishermen in the Gulf could not get the snappers to take their bait, because of the quantity of dead locusts floating about. Two flights of these destroyers passed over our city during the summer, in both cases taking towards the south. If, as some assert, they have left their eggs to fructify next summer, the strong probability seems to be that their progeny Will be obliged to take to cannibalism from sheer necessity, for I don't see how they will get vegetable food to supply their wants. I think I shall take a tour to New Zealand, for I shouldn't like the locusts to do for me what the rats did for Bishop Hatto. Well, '* sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." The locusts are drowned, the mosquitoes are dead, the spiders and gnats, the flies and centipedes have ceased to torment and affright, and South Australia is to-day a very cheerful and comfortable place to live in, which is a great deal more than could have been said of it a few weeks ago, the very remembrance of which makes one begin to feel warm. I visited the other day a pleasant little farming district some forty miles north of Adelaide, and became, for the first time, acquainted with country life in South Australia. The whole of the country between Adelaide and Gawler has been cropped year after year for upwards of twenty years, and has been so completely beggared out that I should imagine a very large proportion of it to be almost worthlesß for agricultural purposes. On either side of the r lin& of railway you see big, bleak, ragged looking paddocks surrounded by dilapidated post and rail fences, and, as far as 'l riould judge, a tolerably determined flock of sheep might have taken across' country between Adelaide and Gawler without much hindrance in the way of fences. -Here and there those monotonous lines were varied with a hedge of kangaroo furze, but these live fences do not seem to answer, and in the main this furze was only growing in irregular patches, looking in the distance like scraggy bushes of 'Gape broom. The large proportion of " the" hoineisteads were but sorry stone Bhaniies, and the absence of outboildings andi stacks was a noticeable feature as compared with New Zealand farm scenery; one' missed also the trimly kept garden so common with you, and the long lines of well trimmed gorse hedges. The dreary, and in- many cases squalid, appearance of country houses both here and in Victoria presents a sorry evidenced the impoverished condition of many of the tillers of the soil. Time was when these Adelaide plains brought forth abundant crops ; when they only required to be "tickled with theharrow tolaogh with

the harvest ; " but " Ichabod " is now very plainly written on almost every acre of them. The only way to insure a crop at all is by a long course of fallowing and working tfie land, so as to destroy tb<> rubbish in the shape of wild oats and drake which accumulate upon it. The inability to grow English grasses is a very serious drawback to the success of agriculture in this country, and one which no amount of good farming can altogether mitigate. \Wheat, wheat, wheat, year after year; then wheat and wild oatsjtheD wheat, wild oats, and drake; and then the three together, with serious doubts as to which had received the thickest seeding; then a varied but scanty growth of vegetation cut for hay; and then wide wastes of dreary fallow lands, with ruin and decay written on every homestead and every fence. The longer the land has been settled, the worse has it become; the baneful influences of cultivation are the most painful sight I ever witnessed in South Australia. I blame nobody for it, I see no remedy for it, except we resuscitate the squatters; and as they have led the van of civilization so let them bring up the rear. At Dry Creek, a station at the junction of the Port and northern line of railways, lies the material imported from England, at a cost of some £20.000, for a bridge across the river Murray. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of expensive iron girders and trusses lie rHSting away at the mercy of the elements. The cost of erecting the bridge and of carting the material to the site, and of making the approaches to it, seem to have been matters of afterthought, for we are gravely told that the Government have no funds to spare for these purposes, besides whirb, the residents on the Murray can't agree as to where it should be, and no Government ever remains in office lon<? enough he.c to settle triviel affairs of this kind. Mr. Yogel might make a bid for it for some of your New Zealand rivers, and the writer will be happy io conduct the negociation. [N.B. — The usual commission of course ] South Australia ought to get rid of it somehow, for it is an evidence of her folly which every stranger laughs at.