OUTBACK AUSTRALIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22628, 20 July 1935, Page 5

OUTBACK AUSTRALIA

SETTLERS’ GRAVE PROBLEMS PLAGUES OF RATS AND CATS (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, July 11. Mr lon Idriess, well-known Australian author, who has just returned from a long tour of the outback, drew a grim picture of conditions which settlers are facing. Droughts, plagues of rabbits, rats, and cats, and the menace of shifting sand were among the grave problems with which, he said, the settlers had to contend. “ I have been out four months,” he said. “I went along the south-west part of Queensland, along the Northern Territory border, the north of South Australia, and the north-west of New South Wales. One trip was down towards Lake Eyre until the sandhill country got so bad that even the camels could not continue. The sand is smothering the country. It is rapidly getting worse. As it is a country of sparse rainfall and the herbage, though good, will only run one beast to every 25 square miles, year in and year out, it deteriorates. Then when countless millions of rabbits come along, not only the shrubs, but the roots are also eaten. After a few years of*dry spells there, are no roots to grow the shrubs again. Then the, winds come and the loosened sand is carried along. It begins to spread over hundreds of miles of country to such an extent that homesteads have. been completely swamped, covered with sand, and abandoned. Water holes are filled up, and there is no water. All the time, the drift is down towards the good country. Unless we have five or six good seasons in succession, so that the herbage can get started and get roots down and bind the sand, the trouble is going to be a national one.”

Mr Idriess said the plague of countless millions of rats had gone over the sandhills spread out like a carpet, eating everything before them. They climbed shrubs wherever they found them, and the herbage waved under their weight. They stripped the bark from the shrubs and ate the roots, bringing the shrubs down. In many places they had<completed the work the rabbits started. They stripped young mulga trees, ringbarking them. The rats invaded homesteads and iowlhouses. eating the eggs. “ These rats are a dirty brown colour, of the size of warehouse rats,” he said. “ When they are there the ground seems to be moving. If you happen to be in a car they won’t get out of the way, and the j wheels pass over a crunching mass of rat. None knows where they come from or where they disappeared to. They have come three times in IS months.” “Following the rats came thousands and thousands of eats,” said Mr Idriess. “ They are (Jomestic cats that have gone bush and multiplied for generations. The majority are a reddish brown colour. At the homesteads where fowlruns are netted against dingoes they have also to be netted overhead against cats. On one station on the Diamantina they shot ISO in one night, and that’s a small number. They seemed to stay thickly about the places where there is water and catch, birds. They are thinning out the bird iife on the three great rivers, the Diamantina, the Georgina, and Cooper’s Creek. So now the rats and cats have given the bushmau something new’ to think about.”

“It only needs rain to transform the country, and when the transformation comes it’s a miracle,” said Mr Idriess. “ But the tragedy is that what used to be drought-resisting herbage has had its roots eaten out, and it will take fnany seasons for the stuff to grow properly again. During the past few months I have gazed on many skeletons, or, rather, the fragments of Stone Age men. The violent sandstorms along the Georgina and the Diamantina and the Cooper have blown the sand from many an aboriginal burial ground, and the fragments lie there exposed in as pitiless a waste as any in Egypt. But not for long, for the rains that have been recorded out in those parts will in a fortnight cover those bones with flowers. I know those, s’andhill flowers well. I saw one this trip. Only one in 5000 milee! It was in a strange

setting. The sun was sinking on leagues and leagues of bare, rolling sandhills, and silhouetted like giant shadows a couple of miles away was a string of wild camels, making further into the desolation that is now Lake Eyre. And at my feet was a single peifect daisy, growing from the remnants of a black fellow’s skull.” "Just two things stood out brightly in. this last heart-breaking trip of mine,” said Mr Idriess. '“One was the work of the Australian Inland Mission and the other the education by correspondence carried out by the Education Department of each State. The A.I.M. sisters had their little hospitals crowded with fever cases, one sister to a hospital doing her best with the patients. Another rode hundreds of miles over gibber plains and parched sand to the farthest musterer’a camp, and there injected all hands—white, coloured, and yellow—with the anti-typhoid vaccine. .The sisters —city girls all of them —made these trips by station car where possible, by horse otherwise, or in the localises where the horse* were all dead, by camel.