FAR NORTH-WEST OF AUSTRALIA.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 December 1921, Page 11

FAR NORTH-WEST OF AUSTRALIA.

OPPORTUNITIES FOP. CATTLE RAISING.

Lieut.-Colonel G. K. Freeman, a man who has trodden many miles' of territory in the Far North-West of Australia, where only a. handful of white men have settled, tells a remarkable story of opportunities that exist there for development. Although opportunities there have been restricted for many years by an area of 4,000,000 acres, containing some of the best land on the Berkley River, having been vested in the Protector of Aborigines as a reserve for blacks which, he says, merely keeps it out of use, he describes great tracts of land supposed by most people to be barren, as being valuable for cattle raising. The North-West,, he says, is a place that really begs for development. From Ord's Creek to Victoria River there is an abundance of Mitchell and Flinders grass, and the country on the Drysdale and Carson Rivers surpasses that on the Ord. Also, there is the King George and Casurina Basins. In this area there are many pockets —not less 'than 100,000 acres each —of grand country, and in all there are thousands of acres suitable for settlement. Large quantities of it, he added, ivhite man had never before aeon.

“Getting down to the Barton Plains,” he said, “one finds more good country. I have 250.000 acres there, and I carry 150,000 head of cattle. West of that, on the Carson, are any amount of splendid pockets, ranging from 100,000 acres up. Make Napier-Broom Bay a port and you make all this area. At the present time betwean Wyndham and Derby there are only three white men and two white women on the Forrest River, and seven Spanish Benedictine monks who get rations once a year. After that there is no white person until within a few miles of Derby. But you cannot hope to develop that country by conforming to the industrial policy of the whites. You cannot pay high rates of wages. Either you must try to utilise the aboriginal labor, which means training jwiungsters from five years or so, or you Wist resort to indentured labor. I cannot agree that the white man can live there and do the work all the time. At the same time if he has the labor he can live there. . My wife has lived there an unbroken -period of five years, and wo have a child born there. Cotton grows splendidly, as does rice in the wet lands. Indian corn also provides a grand cron in Ibo Wet season while Kallir corn grows excellently for sfeek. Millet is also u wofilal)J.e cr<w