INTRODUCTORY. 15 



territories alike, openings exist for the agriculturist and the grazier as 

 favourable as have ever been offered. More fortunes have been made in 

 Australia within the past ten years than have ever been accumulated before. 

 The labourer has put more money than ever into the savings-bank or the 

 building society. The farmer has more rapidly become a comfortable, well- 

 to-do personage; the grazier or squatter has seen his income swell. The 

 value of city property has increased as if by magic. It may be truly said 

 that the chances and prospects of the new arrival are greater to-day, and 

 are likely to be greater for years to come, than they were even in the 

 feverish flush of the gold era. 



Australia is for the present divided into six colonies. As time rolls on 

 we may expect six times this number of states. If some of the larger 

 provinces were at all thickly populated they would be absolutely unmanage- 

 able for administrative purposes. The states are named Victoria, New South 

 Wales, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. They 

 will be noticed in these pages in turn. Victoria, with an area of 87,000 

 square miles, has a population of a little more than 1,000,000. Thus it is 

 the most densely peopled of the group. Agriculture, gold mining and wool 

 growing are its prominent industries, and it is the colony in which manu- 

 factures are most developed. New South Wales has also a population of 

 1,000,000, with an area of 309,000 square miles. She is a pastoral colony. 

 Queensland, with an area of 668,000 square miles, has less than 350,000 

 people, a circumstance that shows how little she has been developed. Her 

 industries are pastoral and gold mining; and in the far north sugar planta- 

 tions have been established under somewhat unhappy auspices. South 

 Australia has an area of 903,000 square miles, and a population under 

 350,000. Much of her territory is absolutely unexplored. Her little com- 

 munity is clustered about Adelaide, and has relied so far upon the export 

 of wool, copper and, above all, wheat. Last of the continental states comes 

 Western Australia, the Cinderella of the group. Her population is only 

 35,000, her area is no less than 975,000 square miles, much of it being 

 absolutely unknown, while the greater part has no other occupants than 

 the black man, the emu and the marsupial. Tasmania, the little island 

 colony, has a population of 135,000, and an area of 26,000 square miles. 



All the capitals are on the seaboard, and, setting the Western Australian 

 Perth aside, the traveller can proceed from one to the other either by the 

 magnificent liners of the Peninsular and Oriental, the Orient, and the British 

 India Steam Navigation Companies, or he can avail himself of splendid 

 Clyde-built steamers run by local enterprise. Very shortly he will be able 

 to land at either Adelaide or Brisbane, and journey from the one point to 

 the other by rail, as the iron chain is almost continuous now, and missing 

 links are being rapidly completed. Whichever capital he lands at, he will 

 find a network of railways branching into the interior, and seated behind 



