CHAPTER XI
WATER FOR THIRSTY LANDS
NO OTHER continent has as much dry land or as little rainfall as Australia. It has a great dry heart enclosed in green. More than two thirds of the country has less than twenty inches of rain a year, or about one third of the annual rainfall of New Orleans, and less than half the average for Boston or Washington. You may have heard of Yuma, Arizona, as one of the hottest, driest spots in the United States. In twelve months it gets less than ten inches of rain. Two fifths of all Australia is just as dry.
Australia is the hottest country on record. I have ridden for miles astride the Equator in Africa, and have visited the arid wastes of South America and Asia, but I have never found heat to compare with this. Out in the country in the dry times one feels he is walking on a tin roof over the lower regions, and the people facetiously say that they have to feed their hens cracked ice to keep them from laying boiled eggs. And yet sunstroke is quite rare in Australia.
Irrigation promises to transform parts of Australia into orchards like those of our Northwest. Her fruits and farm products are already popular in European markets, where the opposite seasons work to her advantage.
Square miles of pasturage have been destroyed and many squatters made bankrupt by rabbits. The larger stations employ men solely to hunt and trap rabbits. A single hunter may kill four hundred a day.
In a year Australia exports 20,000,000 frozen rabbits an $18,000,000 worth of skins for making felt hats and women’s furs. Thus she makes the pest pay some of the cost of fighting him.