NEW SOUTH WALES.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 105, 9 March 1844, Page 3

NEW SOUTH WALES.

In the Spectator of the 29th July last there is a review of a newly-published work on New South Wales. The author of the work is a Scotch gentleman named Hood, who, in the years 1841-2, visited a son established in that colony as a sheep farmer. We reprint one or two extracts, with the reviewer's remarks. By the latter, it appears that the real state of the colony is now pretty well understood in England. !

" The troubles of the bush are various ; loss of sheep, loss of cattle, loss of horses, sometimes from wandering way, sometimes from being carried off in order to claim the rewards offered for their discovery, and sometimes stolen! by blacks or bushrangers who beset the outstations, often robbing and occasionally murdering the colonists. But these evils no more affect the true settlers than gales and nautical inconveniences trouble sailors, — though they distressed the laird ; who gives a capital account of them. For these troubles, however, we have not room ; but we will quote the first topic of a Britisher's discourse —

'the weather.

' For my own part, I conceive that the changes of climate here are fully as great as at home, and more instantaneous ; and that the deluges of rain that do occasionally fall, the dust that almost constantly fills the air and penetrates everywhere, the heat by day and the cold by night, require as perfect dwellings both for man and beast as in other lands. It is true that the thermometer seldom or never stands ct Sydney in winter (May, June, and! July) below 40 degrees, and that the average is 53 degrees ; that the average temperature of sum - mer (November, December, and January) is somewhere about 74 degrees in the shade ;' and (hat there is a dryness in the air that is singularly salubrious. It is certain also that we have not the extreme of heat known in India, nor the cold « northern latitudes; but still we have occasional days of overwhelming heat, when the mercury will, rise in the shade to 85 degrees, and fall iiilJß night to 53 degrees ; and, not to meatio^tfjl^ minuter foes, the insects, we have hurricane winds^ that might be excluded by more substantial- and closer workmanship. ' THE EMIGRANT BABKACKS. 'The present state of the barracks forimxni-

grants in Sydney is, in some degree, a commentary on the system of immigration pursued of late: there are 516 Irish, 164 English, and 35 Scotch immigrants, living unengaged at this moment in tents at this place of refuge. Ireland, from the poverty of its lower classes, readily suggested itself to the wholesale agents for the exportation of human beings as the most promising field from which to obtain lading for their ships and bounty for their pockets. Ambulatory decoy-ducks were employed to traverse its southern (the Roman Catholic) counties, and speechify the unfortunate and discontented into delusive hopes of a better world at the Antipodes. ' The Irish are hard-working men at any fixed and certain labour : they can live at home on simple and scanty fare ; but on reaching the snores of this country their character changes ; they are found to be indolent at their tasks, and troublesome and discontented as to their food. Their families are generally numerous ; and the result is, that they find, when too late, that their labour is not in demand. From what I learnt from several families in these tents, it is evident that the Irish are neither liked in the bush nor inclined to make themselves of value ; and it is a fact that there are many now there that have been five months on the Government allowance of beef and flour, and prefer living on idleness on that, to taking such wages as were offered them. One would have expected a different state of things, and that they would be thankful to get a home and employment. Some arrangement is evidently required to combat this injurious sloth: instead of the charity being extended for such a lengthened period, they ought, after moderate wages have been refused by them, to receive that support no longer. ' In many respects the Irish are unsuited to a pastoral life : they do not in general make good shepherds ; their wives are seldom contented with the bush life ; and the expense of removing their ' families is a great objection to their being employed there.'

" The general exposition of the evils of New South Wales and the method of curing them is the least valuable part of Mr. Hood's work. The two great drawbacks, according to him, are the high upset price of land and the want of labour. To us, the character of the climate and the country seems the great difficulty. Drought periodically recurring seems a thing threatening periodical ruin ; for it does not, like a bad seaeon or seasons in other countries, only involve lots — it causes destruction. The stock perishes in numbers everywhere, and in unfavourable situations almost entirely; a commercial or currency crisis follows this destruction of capital, and the settler is driven to moneylenders to meet his demands and postpone his ruin. Nay, stranger still, there does not seem to be a permanent dependence upon a district. In other countries, a wet season is injurious to cold moist soils — a dry season to sandy ones : but the season passes with only a passing result — the inherent properties of the soil remain. In New South Wales, rivers and streams appear permanently to diminish in quantity, and entail "barrenness or inferior utility on what was once a fertile district.

"In calling for labour, Mr. Hood appears to be echoing a colonial cry : and labour is doubtless wanted — but not indiscriminate or even average emigration. We have seen the state of the Emigration Barracks ; and we do not learn from Mr. Hood's scattered facts that enterprise is continually checked for want of labourers, or that the present distress of the colony could be remedied by mere numbers. The great staple, our author says, is wool ; upon this the colony mast rest : his great argument is for shepherds at twenty pounds a year instead of forty. This difference is something to the pocket of the settler; but, looking to the number of sheep one man attends to, its influence in the price of a pound of wool is too slight to affect the general prosperity of the colony. Translating the demand into its true meaning, what the colonists want is the elite of skilled and careful labour at a cheap rate. They want patience, sobriety, foresight, activity, daring courage in horsemanship or against blacks and bushrangers, with a capacity to bear privation and almost total solitude — for twenty pounds a year and rations. "A 'well-stocked labour-market* would, no doubt, effect in New South Wales what it accomplishes at home, render the labourer dependent upon the employer, and, if sufficiently •well-stocked/ place the workmen at his mercy. But this end is not the object of colonization. Under that rare thing, a government with means at its disposal, unskilled labour, of which there vovr appears some in the colony, might be employed in public works to permanently benefit the country — that is, tanks and other receptacles of water; for rain enough seems to fall in New South Wales, but it runs off too rapidly. Had philosophic forethought ever been in the Colonial Office, something of this kind would have been attempted when so much convict-labour was at the disposal of the Government, and was so miserably used or abused. But philosophy and forethought are not the companions of officials, or even of statesmen, nowadays." A correspondent of ihe Sydney Herald of the sth of December last makes the following remarks on the climate and the desription of produce to the cultivation of which it is most favourable :' —

"The climate, of New South Wales, by its general dryness, is favourable to the constitution of a great portion of the colonists ; but its liability to sudden changes from heat to cold, and vice versa, induces much disease. Still, our climate, looking to the latitude of the colony, may, I think, on the whole, be considered genial, as regards man. " But, with regard to productiveness, the everlasting rains and fogs of some parts of the United Kingdom and of Holland, while they are not genial, are productive. The climate of New- South Wales, on the other hand, though genial as regards animal life, is hostile to vegetable Jife, Even the indigenous herb*, plants,

and trees of the colony, though constructed by nature to endure great aridity of climate, sink under it to such a degree that, if a native drop his fire-stick at the end of a summer, the withered grass kindles like gunpowder, and the whole forest for miles round becomee one vast and sublime conflagration; the moisture in the ground, and in the leaves and bark of the trees, furnishing no protection against the raging element.

." With respect to plants not indigenous, such as British grains — pulse, esculents, fruits, and meadow grass — the climate is hostile to the whole tribe. It is only in very favourable and, 1 may add, very rare seasons, that we gather a full crop, that is to say, a crop equal to what is harvested in England or Holland, the quality of land and degree of culture being, the same; that is to say, making an allowance or abatement for the superior degree of culture in those countries, and confining the calculation to the effects of the respective climates alone. " The climate of this colony is therefore more favourable for the production of seeds than for green or fruit crops of any kind. The growth of wheat for the consumption of Sydney will gradually die out through the competition of van Diemen's Land and Valparaiso, and of both rice and wheat from the East Indies and Java. Nothing but a protective duty, and a pretty high one too, will continue to our colonial farmers the supply of Sydney with bread. "Of dried fruits, the production of this colony, I have my doubts, because the fruit must first be rich and plentiful in the green state to be worth drying, which it never will be in ordinary seasons, except on trenched ground, and that ground irrigated as well as trenched, an expense which will never produce dried fruits so cheap as we can import them from Van Diemen's Land, the Mediterranean, and America. " Grapes are grown in this colony on trenched land, and it is therefore possible that raisins, when the merchants of London shall cease to sell Mediterranean raisins in Sydney at 6d. a pound retail, as circumstances compel them to do at this moment, may possibly meet foreign raisins on equal terms ; and, being fresh, may ultimately drive them out of the Sydney market.

" Wine too, if protected by law, during the next fifty years, by a duty of two shillings a gallon the first year, decreasing one halfpenny every year till the duty ceases altogether, is a subject worthy the elaborate labours of a committee of our Legislative Council, and of the attendance thereat of all the more intelligent farmers of the colony to give their experience and opinions. A protective duty on bread and meat is to be scouted, because o n their plenty or cheapness is based the prosperity of every nation under heaven. But a protective duty on wine, or any other mere luxury, the total abstinence from which deducts not one iota from the health and true happiness of the vast majority of every nation, is not to be scouted. " But going back more immediately to our subject, the climate of New South Wales being favourable only to the production of seeds, from its Bteady and perfect refining qualities, insuring infallibly a dry and safe harvest, it follows that to their production, as a commodity for sale in Sydney, that is, for ultimate exportation, should the farmers of this colony chiefly look. And to this, if the Legislature afford them no protection in their growth of grain and pulse, they will be, by the great law of nature, compelled to come; that is to say, in the long run. Our coast, both north and south, is visited by showers when not a drop falls in the interior; and much of the land there being good, wheat may be there grown for Sydney for some years to come. But half a century hence, when the interior farmers shall be doing well by growing oil seeds and other seeds, and dyes and drugs, such as are annually imported into England from the Mediterranean by the million sterling, our coast farmers will have become tired of competition with foreign wheat, and will gradually resort to nature's law. The article of coriander-seed alone would ocenpy a small field of every farm in the county of Cumberland, and its high price in England would pay the farmer for devoting a single field to its culture."