The sheep-owner comes when the wilderness has been partly subdued, the blacks tamed and reduced to idle drunken loafers, and the facilities and cost of carriage greatly reduced. He must either be a capitalist or have the command of large sums of money, for he has to subdivide his country with great paddocks inclosed by wire fences; he must supplement the natural stores of water by scooping out reservoirs, sinking wells, or damming creek channels; and he must erect costly buildings as wool-sheds, stores, huts, &c. The term squatter is quite misapplied to the wool kings of the present day, who are here men of business, watching the markets and the seasons, eager to utilise to its utmost every crop of grass which a good rain yields, and to turn it into mutton and wool, and buying and selling stock so as to profit by every turn of the market.
A good deal of the sheep farming of the colony is now carried on not by individuals, but by joint-stock companies with capitals of many hundred thousands of pounds. In fact, the old-time squatter—the type depicted in such books as Henry Kingsley's stories—is as extinct as the dodo in Queensland, so far as the sheep districts are concerned.
The cultivation of cereals and crops such as are grown in the southern colonies is only practised in Queensland on a considerable scale in the district of Darling Downs, where the comparatively cool climate of the inland plateau is accompanied by a sufficient rainfall to permit of ordinary farming. Wheat is grown, but not to any great extent, the total area under wheat in 1884 being less than 16,000 acres. The soil is very fertile, and the yield of grain per acre is decidedly above the Australian average; but for some reason red rust is a perfect scourge to the farmer.
It is on the fertile scrub land that the most successful agriculture is carried on. These scrubs are generally found on the banks of rivers, although in certain localities broad areas, containing hundreds of square miles, are clothed with scrub. The soil is a deep alluvial deposit; and the close-growing trees on it spring straight and tall in the struggle to reach the upper atmosphere and light, for the leafy roof allows no sun to penetrate to the damp ground, soft with mouldering leaves, but makes a cool green gloom even on the most fiery summer day. There is something very solemn in the quietude of a scrub untouched by the axe of the lumberer or settler. There is no undergrowth, properly speaking, though delicate little ferns and fairy-like mosses nestle close to the feet of the trees. But there is a wealth of parasitical life. Giant lianas twine from tree to tree, hanging in great loops and folds and contortions, suggesting the idea of huge vegetable monsters writhing in agony. Much more graceful are the lovely shy orchids hiding in crannies, and the bolder ferns, springing from great root-masses attached to the stems of the trees, the graceful shape and curve of the leaves, and their pure pale-green colour, undisturbed and undimmed by wind or sun. Among the wilderness of trees may be noticed the victims of the treacherous fig, the dead trunk of the original tree still visible, but enveloped in the interlacing stem of the robber, which has seized it in its cruel embrace, sucked life and marrow out of it, and reared triumphantly its crown of glossy green leaves far above in the bright sunlight. On all these beautiful or strange or weird objects one gazes in a stillness which seems to be intensified by the continuous murmur of the breeze in the leafy roof—a quiet so great that one is almost startled by the timid thud of the tiny scrub marsupial, which, after a gaze of fascinated terror at the intruder, hurries away, or by the clatter of a scrub pigeon or turkey far up in the overarching foliage, or the strange snoring call of the Australian sloth, or native bear.
In the tropical scrub the lianas, the creeping canes and creepers of every description, bind the trees into compact masses of vegetation; and it is a vegetation which, if one may be allowed the term, is of a fiercer type than in the south. Every creeper seems to be armed with thorns, to tear the clothes and lacerate the flesh of the rash intruder, and poisonous and stinging plants abound. Chief among these must be placed the nettle-tree, a shrub with broad green, soft-looking leaves, covered with a down that carries torture in every tiny fibre. Even horses brushed by these treacherous leaves go mad with pain. But in the north, as in the south, the timber-getter rifles the scrub of its treasures of timber, and the sugar planter clears all before him, and skims with his cane-crops the incalculable store of fertility accumulated in the soil.
Sugar Plantation, Queensland.
It is in connection with sugar-growing that the labour difficulty, common in Australia, becomes unusually severe in Queensland. The difficulty is two-fold—climatic and economical. Field work in the tropics is everywhere shunned by white men, and in Queensland, north of Mackay, it has not as yet been found possible to induce Europeans to engage in it. Some of the work connected with cane-growing, also, is peculiarly exhausting, because the canes, when they reach a height of six or seven feet, shut out every breeze, and the heat between the rows is stifling. Then a large staff of labourers is required on a plantation, because during the planter's harvest—the crushing season, which extends over some months—a considerable number of additional hands are required. In a colony where labour is well paid and work abundant there is practically no floating population to furnish these temporary supplies. It follows therefore that the planter must keep all the year round a staff equal to his harvest requirements, and the expense of doing this, if the men employed were paid at the high rate of wages current for white men, would be crushing. The difficulty has been, up to the present time, solved by the importation of South Sea Islanders, who are generally speaking good and docile labourers, not affected by heat, and comparatively cheap. They are engaged for terms of three years, at a wage in cash of £6 a year; but their employers have to feed and clothe them, and to pay for the cost of their introduction and their return to their homes when the engagements are terminated. It is reckoned that the cost of Kanaka labourers, including everything, equals from £25 to £35 a year for each 'boy' employed, though that of course is very much less than the £1 a week, with food and lodging, generally paid to white labourers.
The labour trade, as the procuring of Kanakas is termed, is, however, to be stopped in 1890. In spite of rigid regulations and the care exercised by the Government of the colony, it is a trade which, from its very nature, is liable to abuse, and it has been abused. Vessels trading to islands where the natives knew nothing of the colony or of regular work endeavoured by fraud and misrepresentation, and sometimes, though rarely, by actual violence to procure cargoes of labourers. It must be remembered that the Queensland labour trade has been ever since its establishment the bone of contention in fierce party disputes, and the usual unscrupulousness of party politicians has been displayed alike in attacking and defending it.