THE COMMONWEALTH

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8338, 25 January 1913, Page 9

THE COMMONWEALTH

“Oh, Australia, fair and lovely, Empress of the southern sea."

Tho advanced culturists in the United States, Canada, Italy, and Switzerland are agreed that tho future success of general husbandry depends upon intense cultivation and irrigation. Tho farmers in Australia will be obliged to adopt irrigation because it pay.s, and is an insurance against loss. Farming is tho one industry on which all other industries depend—it may bo called tho •‘bottom industry”—the very basis of society. It is not an incidental calling, blit tho business of millions, a business with an outlook gradually and surely broadening. The industry is being called upon to face greater possibilities than ever before. In Australia half the entire population is crowded in the cities, but a healthy policy of decentralisation is being entered upon with splendid results.

Cities will not cease to grow and to be overcrowded, but the call of the country is being answered by the very Cressure of life in the cities as well as y agricultural advancement, by the new spirit, of the farm, by irrigation and tho enormous possibilities of the miniature farm. It is tho most hopeful feature of tho great, age-long industrial straggle, and in tho tendency to go back to the land Australia will play a conspicuous part. As already said, irrigation will be tho second great factor in the sum of advancement. One has only to glance at the irrigation achieve ments in the great dessa between Batavia and the mountains in Java, on the arid plains of India (in the Bengal presidency, especially), in Canada and the United States, to realise tho possibilities from the application of water in Sunny xVustralia. Fifty years ago 100,000 acres was the total area under irrigation in America. To-day the area is 12,000,000 acres, and five years hence it will be 20,000,000 acres. In Canada’ more than 1,000)000 acres is irrigated. Colonel Denis said last year that in 1916 there would be 5,000,000 acres of irrigated lands in the Dominion. In Switzerland the army of small operators are seeking fortune in the application of water. As competition becomes Queensland will be forced into irrigation enterprise.

Beyond a few acres of sandy soft soil at the ends of the lagoon, where the seed was sown on the uncultivated surface, and covered with a disc cultivator, the crop was neither cultivated, harrowed, nor manured. Members of the local branch of the Agricultural Bureau, who inspected the crop, pronounced it to bo the most wonderful they had witnessed, and all had at one time or other harvested in tho best districts of South Australia. The returns would have been much larger but for heavy and continuous thunderstorms in November, These flattened a considerable portion of the crop, and reduced the prospective yield of grain by fully 500 bushels. A new 6ft binder was used to pick up, cut, and straighten the tangled wheat and oats; the way it performed the extremely difficult task was an education. Twenty horses were employed in the harvesting operations, and were wholly fed on the hay, a large quantity of which was unavoidably wasted, owing to the troubles encountered.

At the Science Congress at Melbourne it was stated by Mr Jfi. A. Petherick that Australia was discovered over 400 years ago by a Portuguese navigator. Delop©, who was accompanied by Vespucci, the Spanish discoverer, for whom the honour of having first made the shores of America was also claimed. Mr Petherick claimed that the coast of West Australia was discovered as far back as 1499. In Peter Alarty’s “ decades ” the discovery of land with timber, resembling karri, and pouched animals, similar to kangaroos, was referred to. It was commonly believed that tho land referred to was South America, but it was Mr Petherick’s firm belief that Australia was the land really visited, H© said that he had corroborative evidence by the discovery at Cracow of a small globe dated 1610, which formed part of the ornamentation of a clock. The globe showed to the south of India a laud outlined, on which were inscribed the words in Latin, “ The Lately-discovered America.” Air Petherick hails the Cracow globe as the crowning proof of his theory.

Among the canine species in outback Australia tho sheepdog is the star performer. Apart from the spectacular interest attaching to his achievements, the amount of human labour that he renders unnecessary saves the sheepowner an annual expenditure of hundreds of pounds; but the sheepdog is not the only friend and helper of man in the remote settlements where labour is hard to obtain, and still harder to lick into shape when it is obtained. A valuable assistant in the work of digging out and destroying rabbits is a dog known on some stations as the rabbiter’s “ right-hand.” He is generally a big, sturdy, savage brute, somewhat resembling a staghound, and his usefulness consists, not so much in the number of rodents he destroys “ off his own bat,” as in the amount of human labour ho saves by his unerring knowledge of the presence, or non-presence, of rabbits in the warrens. If ho merely sniffs at tho aperture of a burrow and passes on, it is 100 to 1 that burrow is untenanted. Should there bo rabbits below the dog squeezes his body into tho opening, and scratches away the earth. An old hand at the diggingout game will seldom waste time on a warren that has been pronounced a “duffer” by his canine assistant. A pack of dogs of this kind gives a sense of security in a lonely camp of one or two men, it being no uncommon occurrence for half a dozen ruffianly bush wanderers to happen along and attempt to take forcible possession of tbo larder, Tho dogs stand for a formidable and an effective bodyguard.