The Australian Drought.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 52, 25 December 1902, Page 2

The Australian Drought.

The latest Australian files to hand announce the break-up of the long-drawn agony of drought that has for so long parched and tortured the principal States of the Commonwealth. It has been a fearful and ruinous experience, and none better than our friends across the sea can more fully relish the poetry and music that lies in the welcome patter of the longexpected rain-drops upon iron roof and weatherboard wall. Someone has remarked in a South American work of fiction that it is only writers who have seen the brown, parched plains and the hecatombs of dead sheep and cattle, and the starved and thirsting survivors of flock and herd, that can put ' beef ' into this sort of poetry. What the drought has meant to Australia may be in "c manner learned from the figures quite recently published by Mr. T. Livingstone, M.L.A., as to the effects upon the future of Victoria—the state that, of all the others on the great island-continent—- was scourged least by the ' sky of iron and the earth of brass.' In Victoria, according to Mr. Livingstone's startling figures, the damage affected an area of no less than 25,000,000 acres, which was practically non-productive. The area in question was settlea upon by 2 r 7,000 people, who were undoubtedly the bone and sinew of the country. Taking an average value of stock which had been lost by death, horses represented £146,700, cattle £ l9s>93°tl 9s>93°t sheep £308,000. Last year (he continues) the production of wheat was 2,703,000 bags, which, at an average of 12s per bag, and a loss this harvest of fully 90 per cent., represented £1,459,620. Other cereals were in proportion to wheat, and the total loss to the State through drought was no less than j£3i775' 000 « The indirect ft>ss, too, was enormous, and it would be a most difficult task to replace what had gone through a drought unparalleled since the settlement of Australia by white people.'