In poor seasons, when water and forage are particularly scarce, hundreds of cattle may die of thirst or starvation on the way. Therefore the stock routes are laid out by the governments to take advantage of every known source of water. Streams, springs, water holes, and stagnant pools are marked out, for in the arid regions the stock will drink about any liquid they can get. Wells are dug and tanks for catching what rain may fall are constructed. New South Wales has seven hundred of these public watering places, which are under government supervision. South Australia’s stock routes extend from Port Augusta to the borders of Queensland and Western Australia, and up into the northwest desert for seven hundred miles. Western Australia looks after two thousand miles of stock routes leading from inland stations to the cities on the southwest coast.
No Australian would think of going through a day without tea. Cattle men, sheep herders, bullock drivers, and even the “sundowner” carry it with them and “boil the billy” over camp fires.
Unlike its rival, Sydney, Melbourne grew according to plan. Collins Street, the main thoroughfare, and the other principal streets were laid out a mile long, 99 feet wide, and in checker-board patterns.
One of the most marvellous things about Australia is her quick recovery from a drought. Within a week after a rain plains that have been reduced to dust, without a vestige of any growth for miles and miles, are covered with green and in a short time furnish luxuriant pasturage. The drought never kills the seeds of native grasses in the ground. Three years after the drought of 1902, New South Wales, which had lost seventeen million sheep, had increased her flocks from twenty-three million head to forty million and the number of her cattle and horses had doubled. By 1905 the number of sheep and cattle in the whole Commonwealth exceeded the figures for 1900.
The Australians cannot be beaten for enthusiastic faith in their country, and some of them go so far as to tell me that droughts are a good thing. They say the soil must rest occasionally and that dry seasons, like ice and snow in cold countries, are simply Nature’s methods of forcing the lands to lie fallow.
CHAPTER XII
MELBOURNE
IT WOULD surprise many Americans who think theirs is the only real country on earth to come down to Australia. Take the city of Melbourne. It is not so old as Chicago, and it is younger than any town of its size in the United States. In 1837, when Chicago was incorporated, Melbourne contained five wooden shacks and eight turf huts. To-day it is a magnificent city almost as big as Detroit. There is not a country in Europe or a state of the Union but would be proud to own such a capital.