president's address. 757 



that its sole object is the furnishing of timber to the saw-miller. 

 That is but one object, albeit an important one, other phases of 

 forestry being the combating of drift sand (alluded to below), 

 planting for the mitigation of floods, the up-keep of river banks, 

 the planting of shelter-belts, and so on. The forester has as much 

 right to claim credit in the national balance sheet for improve- 

 ments such as these as from the revenue arising from timber 

 royalties. The recently published Report of the Western Lands 

 Commission has vividly brought home to us the fact that dealing 

 with sand-drifts is not a coastal question confined to Sydney and 

 Newcastle, but one of magnitude to the far West, and one that 

 must be coped with in the near future unless we are prepared to 

 abandon large areas of pastoral country. The question of dealing 

 with drift sand belongs properly to a Forest Department, and it 

 is of such great local importance to both east and west of our 

 State that I w^ould not continue to leave it be dealt with in a 

 desultory manner, but would make a sub-branch of the Forestry 

 Department responsible for this service. 



It has been suggested that, as soon as possible, a highly trained 

 forester from Europe or India should be appointed to take charge 

 of our forests. My own view of this suggestion is that it is a 

 plausible one, but that it should not be looked upon as a panacea 

 for what is admittedly an unsatisfactory state of affairs. In the 

 first place, if we were to bring a man accustomed to treat forests 

 with despotism tempered by benevolence into New South Wales, 

 which possesses one of the most democratic governments in the 

 world, and which spirit of government has been largely applied 

 to our forests, what would be a foregone conclusion ? If he were 

 a firm man he would come into collision with vested interests 

 immediately; if he were a weak one, he would speedily lose heart 

 in contemplation of the impossible tusk set him; in either case 

 in ray opinion, the experiment would be doomed to failure. Then 

 again, our forests are mainly those of Eucalypts, one of the most 

 difficult groups of plants in the universe, and a stranger must be 

 a few years before he can obtain a knowledge of them sufficientlv 

 intimate for the purposes of the conservator. My view, more 



