San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1893-04-08
RESOURCES OF AUSTRALIA.
A Whole County of Fertile Lands
for Every Inhabitant.

English county for every man,
woman, and child in the Austria
las, absolutely unoccupied and I'M
developed, asserts Mr.. Edmund
Mitchell, of Victoria, in Engineer
ing Magazine.
No amount of wOrd-painting or
piling up of statistics can give even
a faint idea of the vast potential
wealth of Australia. Full revela-
ton only comes when one travels
over the country, and, seeing in
patches here and there what the
soil is really capable of, find the
land vertitable wilderness with
no sign of human occupation en-
cept for a few sheep fences. The
malice scrub of Victoria, extend
ing for tens of thousands of square
miles, has only to be rolled.
burned off, and tickled with
the stump jumping pillow to
produce harvestS of wheat that
cannot be beaten in any other part
of the world. The vast, perfectly
flat area lying between the Murray
and the Murumbidgee rivers has a
soil rich as that of garden, but it
is given over to sheep, running
about one to two acres and prOduc-
ing about seven shillings' worth of
wool per annum. In Queensland,
upon the sayannahS stretching
hundreds of miles in every direc-
ton, the traveller rides or drives
through natural heritage reaching
to his buggy-pOles or his saddle
girths, and in a days journey sees
only a few hundred sheep of few
score of cattle; population in the
proper sense of the word there is
none.
The unbounded productiveness
of these virtually waste lands is
proved by actual results. Austria
liza can grow meat, butter, cheese,
wine fruit, and wheat for the
whole world. From a few butter
factories in Victoria, for example,
a single steamer has recently TAX
en- away $4,000 pounds worth of
chilled butter, and shipments are
proceeding upon this scale weekly
for three months each season, al
though it is only within two years
past that the export trade
in this article was commence
ed. Victorian brandy has been
produced by the British medical
journals to be equal in quality to
tho finest French cOgnac. The re-
suits already achieved in Australia
show almost unlimited possible
ties of wine-making. TIL" fruit
trade also has an indefinite future,
grapes, peaches, apricOts, Organges,
lemons, pears, apples, plums, pine
apples, and almost every other
known variety capable of sea trans
port fourishing as in the sunniest
corners of France or Spain, or
Italy
Then, even the already import
ant pastoral industry is capable of
expansion, for an immense area Of
country is still unstOckcd, and in
the wool growing districts a system
of small farming, with cereals and
stock dividing the attention of the
agriculturist,w would vastly increase
the prOductiVeness of the sheep
runs. The fattening of sheep and
cattle for export in the frozen state
to the markets of Europe is an en-
terprise as yet merely in its in
fancy. The primeval forests in
many regions are rich in valuable
timbers, but their silence is still
unbrOken by the ring of the
wOOdman'S axe. Instead of the
three thousand camelS now in use
in the arid regions of central Aus
tralia there might be a hundred
times that number, opening up
pastoral country as yet incapable
of occupation through the impos-
sibility oil getting up station sup
plies, and enabling gold reefs to be
worked where men cannot now
subsist for scarcity of water.
Only a pinch of the mineral
wealth in the bowels of the earth
has yet been extracted. In Tas-
mania is the biggest tin-mine in
the world, Mount BischOtf in New
South Wales the biggest silver
mine in the world, the proprietary !;
in Queensland the biggest gold
mine in the world, Mount Morgan
in South Australia, one of the big
gest copper-mines, Montana;
around Newcastle, New South
Wales, among the most extensive
coal measures anywhere to be
| found. But though hundreds Of
millions of pounds sterling worth
of minerals have been raised in
Australia, it is certain that thous-