Philip Mennell

“ One hundred and eighteen miles from Albany one comes across a settlement which is not only the sample one on the West Australian Land Company's concession, but is destined, it is to be hoped, to be the model for many such another all over South-western Western Australia. Katanning is not only the central station of the Great Southern line, but it is the centre of what bids fair to be in the near future a splendid agricultural district, supplying any amount of corn for conversion into flour at the newly erected roller mills, which are the boast and pride of the township. ”

“ Broadly speaking, the Australasian public man is entitled to bear the title of "Honourable" within his own colony during his actual tenure of office as a member of the Upper House or as a member of the Ministry of the day in such colony. In all the Australasian colonies members of the Ministry are members for the time being of the Executive Council, which corresponds somewhat to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, and it is to their membership of this body that they owe the title of "Honourable," which they cannot assume until they have been sworn into its privileged precincts. ”

“ The want of population is the one thing which keeps Western Australia in the rear rank of the Australian Colonies, and her necessity is thus in the best sense of the word England's opportunity. It is a monstrous absurdity that fifty-four thousand people should be holding—certainly not utilising—a territory which it would be equally ridiculous to deny is capable of supporting several hundreds of thousands, even without those mineral discoveries which, if persistently ex­ploited, would very soon attract thousands from the other colonies, and thus create a consuming population. ”

“ The attractions which Australia seems to me specially to offer are, to the ordinary­-going man, who looks not so much to palaces and purple and fine linen as the goal of his hopes, as to the humbler, but not less praiseworthy aim of owning his own home and homestead, and of seeing his children, before he dies, lifted up some way on that ladder of social ascent which his own lot forbade him to climb in the land of his birth. ”

“ In the first place, the titles of honour and office given to the several subjects of biography are those which they are entitled to bear in their respective colonies, though, by a strange anomaly in the constitutional formularies of a country which will mainly go down to history in connection with the glories of its colonial empire, the most commonly borne title in the last-mentioned portion of her Majesty's dominions—that of "Honourable" — is not conceded recognition outside of the colony in which the public services of which it is the reward have been rendered. ”

“ To the tourist in search of the picturesque, Western Aus­tralia has few attractions. There is no scenery in the easily accessible parts of the colony comparable with what may be found in a hundred places on the east coast of the continent. There are places that may be called 'pretty,' but nothing grand or majestic. But to the botanist the whole of the southern portion of the colony is a paradise of wild flowers, No other part of Australia produces them in such profusion or in such varieties. ”

“ With money to spend on public works, employment will be brisk; and, though I do not advocate the influx of men wholly without capital, it must be remembered that every man who comes to the colony with capital makes room for the arrival of men with none. The colony is just now admittedly on the rising tide, as there is room for the exercise of enterprise in a variety of directions ­ which it would be difficult to particularise, but which colonists of the right mental and physical stamp will soon find out for themselves. ”

“ Sometimes, but comparatively seldom, the traveller comes upon an open sand plain, covered with shrubs and flowering plants in infinite variety and exquisite beauty, and often, especially in the northern and eastern districts, low scrubby trees and bushes fill the place of timber, but, taking the word 'forest' in its widest sense as wild, woody, and bushy country, Western Australia, as far as I have seen it, is covered with one vast forest, stretching far away into regions yet unexplored. A very large proportion of this is heavy timber country. ”

“ It will be a stretch of international courtesy indeed if we are to make room for an increasing influx of foreign sweaters into the East End of London by the exportation to the colonies or elsewhere of the British bone and sinew, which has the prior right to what is going in the local labour market. It is not, however, so easy to stem the tide of that rural emigration which is constantly sweeping into the metropolis and rendering work scarcer and food scantier for those with whom life is already sadly too much of a hand-to-mouth struggle. ”

“ The production of cheese is a branch of industry that has not occupied the attention of many in the colony. At every agricultural show excellent cheeses are exhibited—equal in every respect to the imported colonial article. The industry is, however, not yet established, and may only succeed on a large scale under a factory system. Nevertheless, the Commission can recommend its production at once as an adjunct to the dairy farming in the colony, where the dairy farmer has the ad vantage of a family and cheap labour to give that attention so indispensable to good cheese-making. ”

“ In the case of young working fellows without capital, they might be able to take up land out of their savings, and bestow quite sufficient attention on it in their leisure to develop it satisfac­torily; as the labours of agriculture are by no means so exacting in Western Australia, where very little manuring is done and the land is scratched rather than ploughed as in the old country, where much higher farming obtains. As I said before, the more emigrants who go to the colony with money the better they will make it for men with no capital beyond their labour. ”

“ Guest-chambers having been assigned to us, the good bishop, who bears his eighty years better than common mortals bear sixty, showed us over the garden, with its acres of vines, its golden orange and lemon trees, its flourishing tobacco plants, which supply snuff to the brethren, and its wealth of various kinds of healthy vegetables. Wheat cultivation is carried on over a large area, but the sheep are the mainstay of the mission, the wool-money supplying funds for the purchase of clothing, farming utensils, and other things which are not producible on the spot. ”

“ As one crosses the south-western corner from the natural harbour of the colony at Albany to its less favoured rival of Fremantle, which the exigencies of the capital and the present trend of settlement will, to all appearance, compel the local parliament to convert into the main port for ocean-going shipping, one realises what a tiny area out of the total of a million odd of square miles has yet been subdued by right of actual tillage under the constitutional sceptre wielded from Perth. ”

“ Dairying is certainly in its infancy in Western Australia; and even with a very gradual increase in the population—which, by the by, the latest returns assess at just under 54,000—might be most profitably carried on, the large amount of butter imported from South Australia being some measure of this, and by no means a credit to the energy of the West Australian farmers, who, however, have bad the excuse, as I have pointed out before, that they could make a living easier than by undertaking industries requiring capital to start and constant care and exertion to sustain them. ”

“ For the immigrant that Western Australia wants, the man whose mission is to make the wilderness blossom as the rose, the two private railways, built on the land-grant system, have been the necessary precursor. Take the Great Southern line as an example of how these com­panies have paved the way for settlement. The railway, ad­mirably built, carefully maintained, and well furnished with first-class rolling stock, traverses a country that ten years ago was practically unknown. ”

“ The selections of the Railway Company will, undoubtedly, embrace the very eyes, or most valuable areas of agricultural land in the colony.
"The settlers along your line of railway are men who, as a rule, commenced with no capital, yet who have struggled bravely through many vicissitudes and years of trouble success­fully, and have eventually made money. They are not a complaining class, but men of individuality and courage, sturdy yeomen, worthy of the old land from which they came. ”

“ But the opening of this inland navigation is not favoured by the Fremantle folk, who have great faith in the future of the port, and rather regard Perth as a hostile territory with pretensions which it is their duty to keep in check. The port is certainly a bright and bustling little place, more given over to commerce and its accompaniments than the placid metropolis—where nobody ever seems in a hurry—and is bound to grow in wealth and importance with the certain progress of the colony. ”

“ What disillusionises the better class of emigrant, and what makes him feel sorely that he has gone from the frying-pan into the fire, is when, on his arrival from the old country, he is confronted with the fact in all its nakedness that the farmhold to which he has looked forward so hopefully is, after all, only a slice out of an interminable forest, and that it will be two whole seasons before he can get even a small portion of it into cropping order, and that in the meantime money must be found for house­ building, clearing, fencing, and the keep of himself and his wife and family. ”

“ I have ascertained from official sources and the evidence of several old settlers, as well as from personal observation, that the southern portion of your property possesses a climate of the most delightful character for residence and certain agricultural productions. An examination of the map will show how this is secured. As all the southern portion has a large water frontage in the proportion to the area of land thereby affected, with much timber, and a great variety of aspect by hills and valleys, there are some of the most favourable conditions for rainfall and its conservation. ”

“ Whatever betides, its splendid harbour cannot be taken away from it, and though the preponderance of population and property in the vicinity of the capital, and the convenience of settlers still farther north, has led to Fremantle being regarded as a more desirable port for improvement and development at the hands of the State, it is quite clear that as the colony advances Albany must advance too, being, as it is, the entrepôt of a large portion of the southern district tapped by the Great Southern Railway. ”

“ To my mind the successful settler of the future will be one who is not bound by hard and fast and arbitrary lines, but one who will cultivate thoroughly and well every product that his land will produce, and for which there is a market. ”

“ Under a scheme of semi-prepared farms the advantage to the settler would be that instead of having to wait two seasons for a return he would get it in one. If he were wise he would arrive in February or March, plough and sow by the end of May, to be able to harvest his first crop by the end of the year.
It is idle to dogmatise as to the amount of land or capital which a man may do well with. Everything depends upon the man. In many cases in Western Australia men commencing with 100 acres, and no money at all have gradually grown to affluence. ”

“ Farmers should pay particular and unceasing attention to having a few heavy mares, and so supply the colony with draught stock. Throughout this belt the climate and soil is entirely in favour of the horse, as is also the whole of our northern areas, extending up as far as the De Grey, and, with care and attention to young stock, animals can be produced equal to those bred in any part of the world. With good draught stock the farmer reduces the cost of his production: it is the power he requires ”

“ Social contrasts are, no doubt, becoming accentuated, and social distinctions defined, even in Australia, but where all are avowedly engaged in the material development of the country, there cannot be quite the same line drawn between the officers and the rank and file of the great army of industry, which prevails amidst the more complicated conditions of the old world, in which everything has had to broaden slowly down from precedent to precedent. ”

“ For the first five years the purchaser merely holds a licence, and is, in fact, a probationer, with no disposable interest in the freehold. If, however, he pays the rent, fences in the land, and resides upon it during the five years, he is then granted a Crown lease for fifteen years, and if at the expiration of that time, or at any time previously thereto, he can show that he has effected improvements, exclusive of fencing, equal in value to the full purchase money, a Crown grant will be issued to him placing him in full possession of the freehold. ”

“ It certainly would not suit the Company to give the tenant a full holding of the best land, and it certainly would not suit the tenant to get nothing but the worst. In the calculation I have given as to the capital needed for working from 500 to 1,000 acres of land, I am, of course, taking the case of a man who means to go to work gradually, clearing and planting a little fresh land each year, and doing even his fencing by degrees. ”