LAND AS MONEY SINK

Taranaki Daily News, 10 February 1934, Page 24 (Supplement)

LAND AS MONEY SINK

THE NORTHERN TERRITORY. COSTLY FARM SCHEME FAILS. Sydney, Jan. 25. The Northern Territory has often been describbd as the money sink of Australia, and it must be admitted even by the Federal Government that the description is an apt one. Thousands upon thousands have been spent on various schemes, and all of them have failed. The idea has been to thoroughly test the potentialities of the North. There has been a lavishness which could hardly be justified even in the boom' days when most of the money was spent. The costliest venture of the Commonwealth Government in agriculture in the Northern Territory was the establishment, at a cost of £30,000, of a demonstrating farm at Batchelor. It has now been leased in perpetuity at a rental of 5s a week and on the payment of £142 for improvements—improvements that actually run into thousands. The price covers 2553 acres of land on the farm, all the buildings and the leasehold of 48 square miles of adjoining territory. Such are land values in the neglected North. The farm was established in 1912 on land chosen because it was “typical of the bulk of land in the North,” to demonstrate the possibilities of agriculture in the Territory. Nearly every venture on the farm was a hopeless , failure. Costly blood-stock Clydesdales imported from New Zealand. were killed by buffalo flies and other pests or were bogged of suffocated during the wet season. Prize pigs took to the bush and the sheep were killed by grass seed. Dairy cattle died from the heat, or some of them were taken by crocodiles. White ants ate the luxuriantly-equipped stables, machinery sheds and barns, and ate some of the crops. Except for small isolated patches of not more than a few acres there was insufficient soil above the ironstone base to grow anything. Wheat and lucerne failed, and oats, rice, and barley were tried- without success.

Pineapples and maize grew well, and tropical fruit and pumpkins flourished with irrigation, but these products could find no market.