Victoria has, besides, some twenty irrigation projects of her own, the most important being the one in the Goulburn Valley, which serves nearly nine hundred thousand acres, or an area greater than that of the state of Rhode Island. New South Wales’s principal scheme is the Murrumbidgee River project, which, when completed, will water two hundred thousand acres.
For the Murrumbidgee scheme the government first bought a tract of about three hundred and fifty thousand acres. Then it started construction of the Burrinjuck Reservoir, a lake forty-one miles long formed by damming the river. The state surveyed the land, fixed routes for highways and the railroad, put in a tree nursery, established an experimental farm, made brick for houses, cut up the land into farm blocks, and got a planning expert from America to lay out the smaller towns and the two future cities of Leeton and Griffin. After twenty million dollars had been spent in this preparatory work the land was opened to settlers.
Leeton and Griffin are now model cities. Each has a civic centre, broad straight streets for business, and pretty winding streets for residences, with a playground for children in every block. The factory districts are segregated and have railroad sidings so that transfers of freight may be easily effected. Butter, cheese, and bacon factories and fruit canneries have been erected and have done well.
It was a bright day in Australia’s farming history when its supply of underground water was discovered. Its Great Artesian Basin is the largest known. It is bigger than the state of Texas, taking in a large part of Queensland, ninety thousand square miles of South Australia, almost as much of New South Wales, and twenty thousand square miles of the Northern Territory. In this vast area there is little or no surface water, but under it lie lakes and streams, which supply many gushing wells. Two of Queensland’s wells flow two million gallons of water every day, while sixteen of them have a daily outflow of more than one and a half million gallons. Some are very deep. The well at Winton was sunk four thousand feet before water was struck, and in many the water has come from a depth of more than half a mile. In New South Wales a large number of bores have been drilled, and in South Australia artesian wells are multiplying rapidly.
The water from the deep wells is often hot enough to scald a dog to death. It is slightly salt and contains some soda, but generally the sheep thrive upon it. In some cases, however, it is too full of mineral matter for the stock and can be used only for irrigation.
The water from the wells is run to the pastures in pipes and ditches. The ditches are made with huge ploughs constructed of logs in the form of a V, the end shod with iron. A team of eight or ten oxen drags the plough along the course desired for the stream. This makes a broad furrow, forming a canal at which the stock can drink. There are many canals of this kind from fifteen to twenty miles long. One of the best features about artesian water is the fact that droughts do not affect the supply.
In some of the dry areas where there are no streams for irrigation and where artesian water is not to be had or is not usable for either stock or irrigation, catchment basins and reservoirs have been built to conserve rain water. Sometimes these are dug down below the surface of the ground and roofed over to prevent loss by evaporation. In places skeleton buildings with large roof areas are set up to catch the rain.
Moreover, the Australians are learning the lessons of dry farming and of laying up supplies against unfavourable seasons. Many of the stockmen, especially those with small holdings, pack away grass in pits dug in the ground. Salt is mixed in with the fodder to prevent its fermentation and the whole mass is covered with earth to exclude the air. Treated in this way, the food will keep for years, and insure against loss of stock by starvation in a dry season. Nevertheless, the settler is not safe in starting to raise sheep or cattle unless he has enough capital to tide him over the lean years that are sure to come.
As a rule, the dry spells affect different parts of the country at different times. Hence the stock can be saved by being driven from stricken areas to places where the pasturage is good. The dreaded droughts as well as the need of feeders to the railroads account for the stock routes that form a network over the whole country.
In Australia, as in all countries, the cattle regions are in wide, unsettled areas. The cattleman has his herds “’way out back” in the “Never-Never Land” where they roam over unfenced tracts of vast extent. In the Northern Territory the average pastoral holding is two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres. The great events of the year are the “musters” of the “mobs” of cattle, when the stock is counted, sorted, branded, and selected for marketing. Sometimes the trip to the nearest port or railroad will take as long as five months. The law demands that the cattle roads be kept open and that the stock be allowed to feed on a half-mile stretch on each side of the route as they pass along. It also requires that the cattle move at least six miles a day.