BY J. n HEi^TDERSON, F.IC. Xl- 



again risen in price and stacked lucerne would have returned 

 many times the cost of stacking. Five years ago the 

 Government fruit expert published the fact that in the 

 Cleveland district alone 300 tons of mangoes were allowed 

 to go to waste — it did not pay to market them As old 

 trees yield from 1 to 2 tons of fruit in a good season, it is 

 evident that thousands of tons of mangoes go to waste 

 in Queensland every good season. 



There is something seriously wrong with the people 

 of a country in which superabundant wealth of agricultural 

 products is produced in a good season, only to be to a large 

 extent deliberately wasted, and who cry out with pangs 

 of starvation after one dry year. Surely with all our 

 education and training and our agricultural experts, it 

 will not much longer be left to sad personal experience, 

 the most costly of all teachers, to teach many of those 

 engaged in agriculture the necessity of making the good 

 seasons provide for the bad. 



A most serious blot on our national life is the primitive 

 and wasteful manner in which we are attempting to settle 

 people on our lands. The sacred right of individual liberty 

 has, in this case, been carried to an absurd extreme. It 

 is still true " none of us liveth to himself." The State 

 recognises not only the right of the individual to a certain 

 amount of freedom, but on the other hand insists that 

 as he is a part of the State he must not damage the State 

 by, for instance, destroying himself. Where the freedom 

 of the individual undoubtedly and seriously conflicts Avith 

 the good of the State that freedom should certainly be 

 curtailed. Nothing can damage our State more seriously 

 than to have men throwing away their substance and the 

 best of their lives attempting impossible tasks in pioneer- 

 ing. And yet it is not many j^ears since I heard of a family 

 of new arrivals from England, with only £50 capital, being 

 allowed to take up prickly pear land. The result was a 

 foregone conclusion — -they held out until starved out and 

 then abandoned the hopeless task. Most of us in travelling 

 over Queensland have seen the remains of not one or two, 

 but of hundreds of abandoned homes, most of them repre- 

 senting a waste of capital and life which can be ill-spared 

 in our vast territory, and which a little more knowledge 



