THE New Zealand Herald AND DILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, MAY 15, 1908. AUSTRALIAN IRRIGATIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13750, 15 May 1908, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, MAY 15, 1908. AUSTRALIAN IRRIGATIONS.

The Australian State Governments are at last entering seriously upon a great campaign of irrigation, the ultimate issue of which must be to completely transform the agricultural methods of the eastern half of the' continent and even its climatic conditions. Mr. T. A. Coghlan, the New South Wales Agent-General, has been outlining at the Colonial Institute six great irrigation schemes which involve an outlay of over seven millions sterling and the Victoria Government has under its consideration a scheme that will cost five milI lions sterling and settle an additional half million people. South Australia is also contemplating gigantic developments of the irrigation experiments it has carried on, and though Queensland is more backward in this direction it is only a question of time when the northern State will be : found energetically entering the same great field. . For throughout the' eastern States, an irregular and spasmodic • rainfall is the enemy. The average rainfall throughout an immense part of their contiguous is ample for agricultural purposes, and even where the average rainfall is insufficient there are huge tracts of magnificent soil which the conveyance and conservation o'" ! water by means of rivers and canals might bring under highly profitable use. In Central Otago we have a comparatively rainless district wherein river water from mountainous country flows freely, and here New Zealand's irrigation schemes have their home. But in Australia there are vast areas under very similar [ conditions areas so vast that a hundred . Central Otagos would - not cover them. The greater part of 'New Zealand is easily settlable agriculturally ' without irrigation; the greater part of Australia is not settlable agriculturally, and only speculatively- settlable pastorally, without irrigation. Upon the islandcontinent irrigation, if not exactly a question of life or death, is a question upon which the future , status of the Commonwealth undoubtedly depends. Irrigated, Eastern Australia may carry forty millions as easily as it now carries ' less than four millions. And upon its powei to < maintain many millions of British settlers, depends the power or [ Australia to maintain its millions of square "miles against the swarming, | myriads of the adjacent East.

The traditional and written history of Australia is . , the - history of the - attempts of various .." civilisations to conquer Nature ; in this; its greatest stronghold. It has been known to Asia for ages,' but has been inaccessible even to ■ Asiatics with the ' means of settlement to which they have Until lately been limited. T ! 3ie ' European came with- his better tools and his domes*' ticated animals and his more extensive trade. It fell to the shepherd and the. Cattle-man ; and behind these pioneers followed the gold-miner and the farmer. To-day it is the home of a great and prosperous British community, who have won our New Zealand admiration by the dauntless courage with which they , combat its floods and droughts, and who . have our ..unqualified good wishes ..'in the efforts they are about to make to establish their agriculture upon a sound and permanent footing. For although there is wealth as well as romance in wool and gold it is the farmer and the farmer alone who i makes the permanent occupier of a country. Within this short-lived century we have seen Australia buying her food and her fodder from these comparatively minute islands of ours, and we have watched her settlement beaten back from almost the. whole of her immense interior, particularly from the fertile plains that have made New South Wales rich and great. The loss inflicted upon the Commonwealth by that monumental drought can never be calculated, but it mounted into the hundreds of millions of pounds sterling, and was greater, than that suffered in the most destructive war. For over fertile areas, many times larger than New Zealand, nothing escaped but mankind ; the very birds disappeared ; beasts, wild and tame, perished together . within the network of wire. _Y et the Australians have gone back into this perilous country, have re-occupied it, and restocked it, and are now turning their attention to the great schemes they have since discussed, schemes by which the rainfall may be conserved, the waterways locked, and a dense mass of farms Hung column-wise into the very heart of the Drought Country. For only close settlement can bear the expense of ligation and thus hold the country' in bad seasons as in good. Nor is there packing hope, though it'does not enter directly into the financial side of engineering schemes which are already estimated in tens of millions sterling and will amount to hundreds of millions before they are completed, that the growth of trees and the spread of watered verdure and the atmospheric alterations made by greatly changed 'local conditions, may lead to a profound change in the climate of the great Australian plains. In which case the people of Australia will but add to their many claims upon the possession of their continent. They found it lying waste, worthless, almost tenantless, despised even of Asia; and they are -steadily making it one of the desirable lands of the eaj:th. " '