When an Australian speaks of clearing the land of “scrub” he does not refer to a mere matter of brush and saplings, but to what we would consider a dense forest of full-grown trees.
In the cattle country of southern Queensland the farm houses are one-story frame bungalows, roofed with corrugated iron and often set up on iron piles to keep out the wood-devouring ants.
An American dropped from an airplane into Martin Place, Sydney, would feel very much at home. Many of the newer buildings are of our skyscraper type, while the street is filled with motor cars made in the States.
The state government sent a Prickly-Pear Commission on an eighteen-months’ tour around the world in the effort to find some parasite or disease with which to destroy the pear. It has offered great rewards to any chemist who finds a specific against it, and year by year different methods of extermination are tried out. So far, however, no cheap and infallible way has been found. Uprooting or cutting is useless, unless every single leaf is burned. Squirting a solution of arsenic and soda into each leaf by means of a “pear gun” has proved effective in the case of small growing plants, but this is too slow and expensive on such an overwhelming proposition as fifteen million acres. The remedy probably lies in the closer settlement of the country and the principle of every man’s keeping his own dooryard clean.
CHAPTER V
THE METROPOLIS OF THE ANTIPODES
I AM in Sydney, the fastest-growing city of Australia and the commercial metropolis of this part of the world. People who look upon the island continent as a big desert surrounded by a strip of pasture should come to Sydney. They will find here a city that will open their eyes. It has now about the population of St. Louis or Boston, but it seems to have twice as much business as any place of the same size in the United States. Situated south of the Equator and about the same distance from it as Louisiana, it lies in the centre of the most populous part of Australia, and just where goods can most easily come in for distribution over a vast territory. Sydney is the capital and distribution point for the two million people of New South Wales, a state the size of Texas and Indiana combined. These two million are the richest people of a country with a per-capita wealth of $1,624 or, at five to the family, eighty-one hundred dollars per family.