THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9187, 17 October 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1888.

Irrigation was a wonder-worker in the antique world, and Melbourne, like Babylon of old, has taken up the enterprise of enabling the desert in this way to blossom like the rose. The opportunity for the undertaking which Victoria accorded on a great scale, was promptly imitated by South Australia, and we now hear that the Messrs. Chaffey are encouraged by a third colony—New South Wales—to establish the work there also. As we have often pointed out, the rarity of good havens on the Australian coast has given extraordinary importance to the towns that sprang up beside them. Melbourne and Sydney and Adelaide became at once the seaports, seats of Government and capitals of their respective colonies, and in size and population have attained unnatural proportions. Hence their increasing necessity to get the country behind quickly cultivated, sufficiently peopled. Without a proper rural back, every town anywhere, lias an artificial existence, can have no lease of prosperity. But with the great Australian cities it is all the more a pressing matter of life or of spoody collapse. The colony of Victoria has a aaillion of inhabitants, and out of that

number Melbourne, the capital and port, contains four hundred thousand ! How is Melbourne to continue to employ and support that monstrous amount of population, which has increased by one hundred and fifty thousand within the last nine years 1 Where is she to find markets for her manufactures and imports'? and how can she possibly continue to exist, except by the rapid increase of settlement in the colony of which she is the capital, and more than that, by the spread of agriculture and population in the vast interior, which stretches away beyond the river Murray, her colonial boundary , ? . Sydney and Adelaide stand, though in lesser degree, in the same jeopardy; they also sorely need a strengthening oi: the rural support. But then drought is the curse of Australia. With the exception of , the few mountainous or hilly tracts, that continent is pretty widely a desert for half the year, and in some parts desert at all seasons. Such a circumstance is a bar to agriculture, which only flourishes in the favoured districts, and even there is sometimes frustrated by the breatli of the hot wind—the Australian simoom. When we consider these facts, we can see what an unspeakable boon irrigation would prove to that continent —what a revolution it must effect there if successfully carried out. To be sure, the service of irrigation is riot confined to countries which have a touch of the desert climate. For instance, the European countries where it is best established are JS r orthern Italy, and the Spanish province of Valencia ; and the fields of Lombardy and Piedmont may be said to lie in the shadow of the snow - covered Alps, while Valencia, sloping down from the Castilian tableland to the sea, is fanned by the Mediterranean breezes. They might, therefore, dispense with irrigation ; but it reliably gives the soii a resource of moisture which enhances its fertility, and has secured for Valencia the appellation oi La Huerta, or " the garden." Some weeks ago we commented on the excellent suggestion that in New Zealand irrigation could be introduced with great advantage, and at trifling cost, in the Waikato and the Thames Valley, wherever the rainfall percolates too readily a porous soil. The value of irrigation is not limited to semi-desert tracts, and a telegram, dated Sydney, 11th instant, tells us that " the Messrs Chaffey are inspecting a site on the Nepean Kiver with a view of establishing large irrigation settlements there. ,1 The Nepean runs through a stretch of country which is only periodically scourged by drougiit—namely, the region between the dividing mountain line and the sea ; and it is only natural that Sydney, like Melbourne and Adelaide, should set the system going from points comparatively near where the want is experienced, and from whence in due course it can spread out. But it is in the immense interior of the continent that the revolution will be most strikingly exhibited. The annual overflow of the Nile, giving fertility to the sun-scorched plains of Egypt, suggested the idea of irrigation ; and the Babylonians and neighbouring people accepted the hint ; but, after the fall of their civilisation their country gradually went back to the desert condition. Among the many recoveries accomplished by our modern discoveries, certainly not the least important will be the rescue from sterility of many of the shadeless and parched but not naturally barren portions of the globe. The confidence now felt in Australia about not only the practicable character of the enterprise, but the ease with which it can be put in operation, is shown in tiie fact that New South Wales is taking it up on the same large scale as the other two colonies, without waiting to see how it turns out with them. And there can be no doubt that when the irrigation is complete over the half million of acres belonging to Victoria and South Australia, beside the River Murray, the work will be then pushed forward into that great central region which has been termed Hiverina, because it is crossed at wide intervals and in different directions by the Murrumbidgee, the Lachlan, the Darling, the Bogan, the Paroo, ifce. Most of those streams are in their original state considerable rivers in winter, dwindling in summer to a mere line of water holes; but many have been dammed up by the neighbouring squatters, thereby ensuring a permanent water supply, and by this means what is now being done on the Murray will be repeated after awhile along many other watercourses of the interior, spreading fertility and agriculture over the adjacent tracts. The Australian colonies have at last begun to cope with drought, that terrible enemy to their rural progress ; and the next generation may find transformed a great proportion of the hideous sandy wastes and deserts idle which must always retain a place in history for the dreadful sufferings of their early explorers. It is odd that the practice of irrigation, although so old in the world, has received but very scant attention from European nations. The Arabs brought it from the East, through Barbary into Spain, but only in the husbandry of a few parts of Southern Europe has the system been properly continued. Modern English agriculture is too skilful not to have an occasional place for it even in that cool climate under certain circumstances. And now Americans, those able pioneers of colonising industry, are pushing it to the front in new countries.