66i 



THE TROPICAL AGRlCtJLTURIST, 



[February i, 1883, 



enough, machinery, chemicals and royalty included, 

 to justify tliem in trying its effects. If not by in- 

 ividualds yet by a Joint-stock Company, we should lie 

 glad to see experiments tried. Of fibrous plants a 

 vasi abundance, is scattered over Ceylon, and a simple 

 and inexpensive, or, if profitable in the end, a costly 

 method of utilizing such plants would be an immense 

 oqon to the cojony. 



♦- ■ 



PLANTING IN NORTHERN QUEENSLAND. 

 The following letter from an ex-Ceylon planter to 

 a friend here has been lying by us too long : it is 

 however still of considerable interest : — 



Brisbane, Queensland. 

 1 have breu up into some of the Queensland sugar 

 districtc, and am now on my way south again. I went 

 as far north as Townsville, and have seen the Burdekin 

 and Mackay sugar districls. The best land i<', Ibelieve, 

 still further south than I went, but, as 1 was not on the 

 lookout for any, I eaw no use of going up. You asked 

 nif to t^ive my opinion of Queensland as a place to come 

 t", and 1 wdl endeavour to do so. My knowledge 

 nf til-- country, however, is very small; so yon must take 

 it cum grano salis Many people even now talk of Aust- 

 ralia as a country in which there are very few openings fnr 

 an educated man nitliout means. It all depends on what 

 those people want. To become a big squatter, or 

 even a big planter, requires such a large capital to 

 start with, that no new chum has a chance of start- 

 ing at once as such. And. unless a man is a fool, in my 

 opinion no one without at least a year's experience of 

 tlie country ought to think of investing. Every one, 

 no matter who, coming out to settle, must first of all 

 get what is called "colonial experience," if he ever 

 expects t) do any good ; and a ve'-j peculiar experience 

 he will find it. 



Britishers, when they go abroad, are very apt to 

 tliinU tliat they can teach creation anything, and have 

 little to learn, and it is on that account that there 

 are so many cases of young Englishmen coming to 

 grief out here. Life out here is a thoroughly selfish 

 one : every man is doing his best to make money, 

 and there are very many who don't much care 

 h"W thiy make it. To bold one's own, one must 

 have a thorough practical knowledge oneself of all 

 the varied positions one may tumble into. The 

 men who do best out here are tlio.se who can do 

 anything from boiling a billy of tea and yolving up 

 a team of bullocks to managing a sheep or cuttle 

 run. To become a " bushnian" requires many jeara' 

 experience, but I don't see whv a Ceylon planter, if 

 he goes tlie right way to work, .should noi be able 

 to hold his own after a bit, with the best of them. 

 He must, first of all, give up all his Ceylon ideas 

 of comfortable bungalows, nigger servants, and all 

 the minor comforts of Ceylon life, and be prepared 

 to rough it, and be hail-fellow-well-met wiih every 

 one. If he goes on a station, he will have pleuty 

 of riding bucking hors-s. His tucker on the back 

 blocks will be salt junk and "damper," and he will 

 find it a very rough life. If he keeps straight, and 

 gets to know his work, in course of time he will have 

 a good chance of getting a billet as manager. It is 

 not a very brilliant position, and I don't think the pay 

 is particularly good, but, if he keeps liis eyes open, 1 

 should think he would have many chances of yncking 

 up a property cheap. In the above account, 1 

 have been referring to life on the back blocks, 

 because nowadays, in the rented districts, a man has 

 no show at all. The properties are all freehold very 

 nearly, and are worth enormous sums of money. 

 One was sold on the Murrumbidgee run a few monthi, ago 

 for £440,000. 



To do any good as a sugar planter, you must also 

 have a bushman's experience, though it is not so 



absolutely necessary. A new chum on an estate has 

 to start as a ganger over a few Kanaka boys, and from 

 that position he works on. The chief diffieulty a- 

 Ceylon man would have would be his dealings with 

 white labour. Labour of all kinds being so scarce, 

 one must put up with a great deal, and, w"hen there 

 are 50 or 100 white men to deal with, it requires a 

 great deal of tact to work them. All the planters I 

 met told me that the white men were a perfect 

 nuisance ; they are always complaining of their beef 

 being bad, though it is the same beet as the planter 

 gets himself ; or, of their bread being badly baked, 

 ^c. , iSc, and all these little things require careful 

 working, if you want to keop your men. Any one 

 accustomed to the country knows all their little ways 

 and (lodges, but a new chum has it all to learn, and 

 he is wise if he gains his experience at somebody else's 

 expense. 



There is such a run on sugar just now, and so 

 many new places are being opened out, that a man 

 coming down from Ceylon would have no difficulty 

 in getting a billet as an overseer. He would, of 

 course, have to begin at the beginning again, and he 

 must totally forget all about his bungalow comforts in 

 Ceylon. He would be put in charge of a small gang of 

 Kanaka boys, have to rout them out of their lines in 

 the morning, go with them out to the tield at sunrise, 

 remain witn them till noon, when there is an in- 

 terval of an hour for dinner. At 1 p m. he would 

 start them again, and be with them till sundown — a 

 pretty hard day's work, and very uninteresting. But 

 if he stuck to it, in a very short time he would prob- 

 ably be promoted to some general work. He 

 would live in a hut with the other overseers, and 

 might or might nut have a room to himself. Of course 

 he would have a horse and saddle at his disposal. The 

 climate in eummer up in the north is very hot, but 

 not unhealthy ; in winter it is perfection itself. I don't 

 think the pay is much, but everything is paid you and you 

 have no expensive buugalow to keep up and no liquor. 

 As far as the actual work is concerned, a sugar 

 planter's life is much preferable to that of a coffee 

 planter. Sugar is grown chiefly on level land, and 

 all sorts of agricultural implements are used; it is not all 

 nigger-driving. On one large estate of 14,000 acres 

 on the Burdekin I saw a steam plough at work ; 

 and they had over 100 working horses, several 

 teams of bullocks, between 300 and 400 Chinamen and 

 Kanakas, and nearly 100 white men. In one year 

 they have planted 800 acres of cane. To do that, the 

 lanil had to be cleared of timber and all the stumps 

 and roots taken out to a depth of 18 inches, and 

 ploughed and harrowed several times. Unless you 

 have run into the country, yon can have no idea of the 

 immense amount of work that all that means. There 

 is no shirking work allowed, and you will see that 

 a man mnst have a peculiar all-round sort of 

 experience to bi at the he.ad of such a couci rn. 

 Laud suitable for sugar is being taken up so rapidly 

 now that it is almost beginning to get scarce. Good 

 land only lies on the banks and about the months 

 of the various rivers up the coast, and I believe 

 some is being taken up away in the extreme north. 

 Eighteen months ago on the Burdekin you could get 

 any quantity at Ss per acre, but now none is to be 

 had under as many pounds. The soil is magnificent, 

 a rich dark alluvial, in places several feet deep. On 

 the Johnstone I believe it is still finer, and on all 

 the rivers north one hears gond accounts of it. Up 

 north they are still very much bothered with blacks. 

 To put up a mill is out of the question for the 

 small capitalist. If a mill is to be put up at all, 

 the larger the scale it is, all the better, provided there 

 is laud enough to keep it supplied with cane. A 

 m m of small ineane, it he gets land in some district 

 where there is already a mill, can grow his corn for 



