CHAPTER II.
RIVAL COLONIES.
NEW South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles.
The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of “shoddy;” but of Queensland—an agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich lands than they themselves possess—the Sydney folks are not without reason envious.
A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; labor is scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labor unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, and the colony—a wheat-growing country—is now importing wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterling every year.
The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonial democrats—a policy which, however beneficial to Australia it may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the arrivals of strangers—at all events, of skilled artisans—are still excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade.
To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of capital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queensland and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among the causes of the momentary decline of New South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an over-great supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are just the immigrants of whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in England of dissuading letters.
As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though it will be replaced by a political divergence, and consequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation.
In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands, “squatters,” as they are called, sheep-farmers holding vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the government, and administer the laws to their own advantage. In New South Wales power is divided between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in the interests of the people put an end to their reign; but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior districts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the “up-country desert” or “unwatered tracts” can never be made available for agriculture, while the democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same statements were made only a few years back of lands now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural settlers.
The struggle between the great crown tenants and the agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one way, but in Queensland the character of the country is not entirely the same: the coast and river tracts are tropical bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impossible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices alone can be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, and quinine.