Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

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: