CHAPTER III
QUEENSLAND
MOST travellers from our hemisphere first set foot on the Australian continent at Sydney, the biggest seaport of the country and the seventh city in size in the whole British Empire. I first stepped out upon its mainland at Brisbane, which lies five hundred miles north of Sydney and is the capital of the state of Queensland.
In coming down the coast from Thursday Island and Torres Strait I had one of the wonder trips of the world, for my way lay inside the Great Barrier Reef.
Imagine a chain of coral as long as from New Orleans to Chicago. Let the chain be composed now of atolls, great coral walls encircling lagoons, now of long coral ridges, and now of gardens of the beautiful red, white, and pink flowers fashioned by these insects of the seas. Such is the Great Barrier Reef, which extends along the whole eastern coast of Australia northward to Torres Strait. For the most part it is only from five to fifteen miles from the mainland although in one place it is a hundred miles off shore. At times we were close to the coast, and again were moving along near huge rings of coral that seemed to float on the green sea. Some of the atolls had vegetation upon them, their round basins being circled with coconut trees, while others, seen only at low tide, were stony and bare.
The air was wonderfully clear and the sky a heavenly blue. The few clouds made big patches of dark blue velvet on the dreary gray of the Australian mountains. The sea was as smooth as a mill pond. We were feeling our way along through a wide canal, one side of which was walled with the cliffs of Australia and the other by this masonry of countless millions of coral polyps. Our steamer had to go cautiously, for under the smooth waters were treacherous spurs and peaks of coral ready to rip holes in her side. Our captain kept a sharp lookout for brown waters, which mean bars, or green, which indicate coral, and steered a course through the deep blue of the safe passage. Among navigators the shallows between Cape York and New Guinea have the reputation of being the worst waters in the world. Some of the ship captains boast that they can smell the coral in the dark, just as those of our transatlantic liners declare that they can smell the ice of the bergs that drift down from the North.
Such cautious sailing began to get on the nerves of some of the passengers and I think all of us were glad when our steamer turned into Moreton Bay, the outer harbour of Brisbane. We approached a low shore of sandy dunes and beaches rising gradually into rolling hills thick with trees. Slowly we entered the mouth of the wide Brisbane River, up which we travelled for several hours. As our steamer went on through the murky water, we could look over the side and see masses of jelly fish, transparent mushrooms of bright violet, tossed this way and that by the waves from the ship. The banks were low and covered with bushes. Along the way there were meat-freezing plants, each surrounded by little houses roofed with galvanized iron, the homes of the workmen.
As we kept on, the country on each side of the river became more hilly, and when we reached Brisbane I found it a place of as many gulleys as Kansas City. Most of the town lies on the right bank of the river. There are many pretty villas, and rising high above them is the Queensland Parliament House.
After a lenient examination by the customs officials, I drove to my hotel through streets not unlike those of an American town. They were paved with wood instead of brick or asphalt. The stores reminded me of ours at home, and the size of the buildings surprised me.
Brisbane, the capital of the second largest of the six states of Australia, has more than two hundred thousand people, and is the fourth city in size on the continent. During the last half century it has had a phenomenal growth. Less than seventy-five years ago it was taken away from the neighbouring colony of New South Wales and became the capital of Queensland. At first it grew but slowly, for it was handicapped by having been the site of the Moreton Bay Settlement, a colony for the worst of the convicts sent over from England. When it began to get on its feet a terrible flood swept away so many of the houses in the low-lying sections that it was believed the town would never recover. Yet it took a new lease of life, and to-day it is hard to realize that, fifty years ago, it was only a village with less than one thousand inhabitants.
The public buildings were planned with an eye to the needs of the future. The State Treasury would do credit to our own capital at Washington. The Law Courts cost nearly two hundred thousand dollars, and the Parliament Building half a million. In George Street is a splendid palace which houses the Lands Office, and the Public Library is a striking piece of Italian architecture. On a steep cliff above the big-domed custom house rises the Cathedral of St. John, considered the finest Gothic structure in all Australasia.
Talking with the Queenslanders it is easy to see that they think theirs is the coming state of Australia. They say the good lands of Victoria have long since been taken up, that New South Wales is fairly well developed, and that such large areas of South Australia and West Australia are desert that those states can never support a great population. Queensland has two slogans: One claims that it is “a paradise for willing workers,” and the other that it is “the richest unpeopled country in the world.” The state has vast tracts of arid land, which it expects to reclaim by artesian wells. It has already redeemed from the desert a country more than twice as large as the state of New York, having discovered that most of the great area beyond the coastal range is underlaid with subterranean lakes and streams, which will furnish water for stock. The cultivated acreage is growing every year. Enough pastures for seventeen million sheep are now in use, and the state has already nearly twice as many sheep as any other division of Australia.
Queensland might be called “The Newest England” of these British south lands. It is a principality in itself. It comprises the northeastern quarter of the Australian continent; from north to south it is as long as from Washington to Omaha, and from east to west about as wide as from Washington to Chicago. It is three times as big as France, and twelve times the size of England and Wales.
The upper half of Queensland is not far from the Equator and raises cotton, sugar, tobacco, and all sorts of tropical fruits. Bananas do so well that one of its nicknames is the “Banana State.” Scrub lands cleared at a cost of about ten dollars an acre can be planted without ploughing and will produce fruit in a twelvemonth. Fifteen tons of pineapples to the acre is not an unusual crop, and pines weighing from fourteen to sixteen pounds have been grown. The factories for canning this fruit that have been started with the aid of the government may some day compete with the great pineapple canneries of Hawaii.
A great advantage of the fruit-growing business in Australia, as in South America, is the difference in seasons in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Being south of the Equator, the fruits ripen at a time of year when European and North American markets offer the best prices, and refrigeration and fast boats are already landing Queensland fruits on our winter tables.
Australia usually raises enough sugar to supply her own needs, and ninety per cent of her crop is produced in tropical Queensland. Sugar cane was first grown here about 1865, and in the early days the plantations were worked with coloured labour brought in from the South Sea islands. Later on it was decided to send the “blacks” home, and keep the resources of the state for white men exclusively. From the standpoint of the growers, this was a real sacrifice, and the Commonwealth government is now doing everything possible to stimulate sugar production. At one time it paid bonuses on sugar produced by white men, but these have been given up. Now the government buys the entire crop outright and controls its refining and sale. The cane is crushed in Queensland, but is refined by the big Colonial Sugar Refining Company in Melbourne and Sydney. Under the government monopoly the consumer pays about twelve cents a pound. Importation of sugar by private individuals or companies is forbidden, and whenever the Queensland crop falls below three hundred thousand tons the government imports enough to meet the requirements.
Australia has her sugar bowl in Queensland, which produces nearly enough cane to supply the entire population. It is one of the few places in the world where the crop is grown without coloured labour.
When it is snowing in New York, the Queensland fruit grower is gathering his pineapples. They are raised on land leased from the government with the privilege of purchase on easy terms.
On the elevated sandstone plains of interior Queensland grows the queer bottle tree. One’s general impression of Australian forests is their total unlikeness to anything elsewhere.
In the southern part of the state are the Darling Downs, four million acres of the richest soil on the continent. Here the average rainfall is more than thirty inches a year, and almost everywhere artesian water may be had within a few feet of the surface. Since they were first settled in 1840 the Downs have been the home of prosperity. To-day they roll away in orchards and green fields, dotted here and there with herds of fat dairy cattle, and checkered with chocolate squares of ploughed lands. I am told that some of the soil is too rich to raise wheat until it has been farmed a few years. In some places it produces one hundred and ten bushels of corn to the acre, and on a number of farms two crops are raised every year. A great deal of money is made in alfalfa, which grows very rank. Often as many as nine crops are cut in one year, each yielding from one to two tons per acre. On the best land it is not uncommon for a man to get a hundred dollars per acre annually out of alfalfa. As a general thing the farming is carelessly done, and but little fertilizer is used. The seeds are merely sown and the crop is reaped.
The principal city on the Downs is Toowoomba, two hundred miles west of Brisbane and two thousand feet above sea level. It serves as a playground and health resort for the people of Brisbane and elsewhere in the hot lowlands. Throughout the year the climate is temperate and bracing, and in June and July, the coolest months of the year, there are often frosty mornings here and fires are welcome at night.
Toowoomba is also the unofficial capital of the rich farming district of the Downs. Its streets are generally full of men who have ridden in from the country to talk sheep, wool, grapes, wheat, or timber, or to seek amusement after their hard work in the fields. Its pretty homes are surrounded by gardens of English flowers and hawthorne hedges and rows of weeping willow trees. I have seen many weeping willows along the streams of Australia, and the people say that all are the descendants of slips brought from the island of St. Helena. In the old days ships bound for Australia used to stop for water at the place of Napoleon’s exile and the outgoing colonists provided themselves with willow cuttings to be planted in their new homes.
Queensland’s great need is more people. In this huge state, capable of supporting a population of many millions, there are less than eight hundred thousand, or only about one person to every square mile. I have before me an advertisement of the Acting-Registrar General declaring that the two necessities of the state are “increased production and increased population” and offering inducements in the way of cheap lands on easy terms to “the industrious in every walk of life.”
Throughout Australia land transfers are made under what is called the Torrens Title, a system which has spread to Canada, to England, and to other countries of Europe, and has been adopted by the United States for the Philippines and Hawaii. Ohio also has adopted it, and others of our states are using it in modified forms. By this system the landowner registers his property with the land office, receiving a duplicate certificate of title. If later he wishes to sell he hands over the certificate to the purchaser, who has the sale registered at the land office, where the facts of the transaction are entered on the original certificate. If the owner puts a mortgage on the property the terms are recorded with the Registrar. The certificate therefore always contains the name of the owner, a description of the land, and a statement of all liens and encumbrances. No title searching is necessary, and by the payment of a small fee at the Registrar’s office, anybody can find out all about a given piece of land. The Torrens System and the secret ballot are two big ideas that we owe to our Australian cousins.
For many years a thorn in the flesh of the small farmers and workingmen of Queensland was the fact that, by special legislation, big lease holders of the public lands paid lower rents per acre than the holders of small tracts. The Land Act Bill of 1915, framed to remedy this condition, was passed by the lower house of the state Parliament but was rejected by the upper chamber, or Legislative Council. The Council was at that time composed of thirty-seven members appointed nominally by the Crown, but really by the Queensland Prime Minister and his Cabinet. They could hold office for life, and no limit was placed on their number. As constituted in 1915, the Council had only two representatives of labour and the rest of its members were conservatives, many of them moneyed men determined to guard their own interests. On the other hand, the seventy-two members of the Legislative Assembly are elected by the people for three-year terms. The Land Act Bill was passed by the next Assembly and again rejected by the Council. Then the government stepped in to see that the will of the people was carried out. It appointed enough new members known to favour the act to swamp the conservatives in the Council, and the bill at once became law. So enlarged, the Council, with its majority in absolute accord with that in the lower house, became a mere rubber stamp for the legislation passed by the Assembly, and even approved the bill ending its own existence.
The government of Queensland is sometimes criticized as a patriarchal institution for coddling the people. Both town and country make all sorts of demands on it to serve their interests. They tell a story of one official who, exasperated by a deputation of farmers, burst out with this:
“You ask the government to do everything. I am surprised that you do not demand that we furnish milk for your babies.”
Queensland, the northern half of which lies just south of the Equator, is sometimes called the “Banana State,” because of the success of settlers in growing that fruit in the newly cleared lands.
The farmer who owned the hill now known as Mount Morgan sold it to prospectors for five dollars an acre. It has since yielded gold worth $125,000,000 besides vast quantities of copper.
In the Anakie gold fields of western Queensland mining sapphires is a well established industry, with an output worth about one hundred thousand dollars a year. The lemon or orange tinted stones are the most prized.