Feb. 2, 1920.] Agricultural Gazette of N.S.W. 117 



Chats about the Prickly Pear, 



No. 1. 



J. H. MAIDEN, I.S.O., F.R.S., F.L.S., 

 Government Botanist and Director, Botanic Gardens, Sydney. 



I KNOW of no subject included under Australian economic botany requiring 

 more candid treatment than that of prickly pear. In the course of time, 

 •with increased experience, we can agree to insist less emphatically on certain 

 of our prejudices, and I may frankly admit that I am now less dogmatic in 

 legard to quite a number of points concerning pear than ten or fifteen years 

 ago. At one time I discounted every method of utilisation, believing that 

 they hindered destructive methods, which I regarded as alone worthy of 

 •consideration. 



My study of the pest now extends over nearly a quarter of a century, and 

 •during that time I have patiently interviewed the local expert who had only 

 ■seen prickly pear on the South Head road, but who was confident he under- 

 stood the magnitude of the problem; those who were equally confident of 

 obliterating the pest by chemical or engineering means when a little con- 

 versation showed that they were ignorant of the most elementary principles 

 of either science; the countryman who knew pear country and had made 

 no headway against it, but who was quite certain that the " townie " had 

 nothing to teach him ; and hundreds of worthy citizen.'* — some with mutual 

 profit. 



The prickly pear question is not appreciated by most people because its 

 inroads are removed from the great centres of population; because it does 

 not particularly inconvenience them, they ignore it — a very human habit in 

 regard to quite a number of awkward problems. I am confident, never- 

 theless, that it will be a bad day for this country whenever we take a fatalistic 

 attitude in regard to prickly pear. It has been said that the British are 

 always at their best when they are fighting against odds, and we must fight 

 the pear with every weapon to our hand or hereafter to be invented. It 

 seems to me that there is some danger of our relaxing our efforts in regard 

 to pear, because some of us are waiting for the biological phenomenon — a 

 -coccus or scale which will do for the pest pear what a certain coccus did for 

 the less formidable Opuntia monocantha in India a century and a quarter ago. 

 Let the biologists get to work, by all means, and more power to them, but 

 let us get busy in regard to methods available to everyone at the present 

 moment. 



In many areas in Queensland and New South Wales the pear has got such 

 an overwhelming hold that we do not, at the present time, see any way out 

 of the difficulty as far as they are concerned. The great bulk of pear country. 



