CHAP. II - RIVAL COLONIES

Summary

New South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles.

The New South Welsh cast jealous glances towards the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold-fields, talk of “shoddy;” but of Queensland—an agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich land than they themselves possess—the Sydney folks are not without reason envious.

A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; hands are scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighbouring colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labour unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, and the colony—a wheat-growing country—is now importing wheat and flour to the value of half-a-million sterling every year.

The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonial democrats—a policy which, however beneficial- to Australia it may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, the labourers for their part assert that the arrivals of strangers—at all events, of skilled artisans—are still excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade.