GOATS AS PIONEERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3861, 13 March 1928, Page 77

GOATS AS PIONEERS.

SETTLEMENT OF AUSTRALIA. SYDNEY. February 23. As the goat is to outback Queensland what the cow is to the outlying parts of other parts of Australia, one man ,describing himself as a farmer, of St. Lawrence, in the northern State, apparently felt himself called upon to offer a serious defence of the former animal, amid all the satire that was provoked by the recent war in Sydney between the law and those staging the recent goat races. Behind the farmer’s story, told in the open columns of one of the Sydney papers, is a little outback drama which may not be uninteresting to New Zealanders. It goes back to the pioneering days. Of a family of 10, it took five, from 9 to 19 years of age, to earn 32s fid a week. Water, carted four miles, cost 3s 6d a cask. Goats bought for Is a head, saved the situation. They provided milk and meat, after a bark house had been erected with the aid of blacks. Water was drawn four miles by five goats harnessed to a , cart consisting of a soap box on wheels, and loaded with kerosene tins. The goats also had to bring in the firewood. Each year, the mothers and children of the district were given a picnic. There were as many as 14 in some of these study pioneering families, 60 years ago. The boys rode their goats to the picnic ; the others went in bullock drays. Very few of the children had either boots or money. There were no banks, doctors, chemists, lawyers, dentists, or babel’s, and no false teeth, in the district of 10,000 square miles,” the farmer adds. “If a man found there was no work, he waltzed away with * Matilda.’ ” It is the dramatic little story, in short, of goats which helped to make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and to fashion out of country that was dirt cheap big districts!- that are to-day the backbone of Queensland. The pity is that the farmer’s story did not get the same prominence as the facetious stories surrounding Queensland’s goats as a medium purely of sport.