12 



have only five acres. The newcomer to the west, who takes the 

 slightest interest in agricultural pursuits, is greatly impressed with 

 'the scarcity and the dean. ess of vegetables, the producing of which 

 is the industry of an industrious and independent class of growers, 

 who, as the result of a system of high tillage that is not excelled by 

 the peasantry of France, are able to raise a great variety of crops 

 in abundance. An acre of ground turns out 8,000 head of market- 

 able cabbages, and other crops in similar profusion. The market 

 gardeners of the South Brighton district form a strong guild both 

 in numbers and aggregate wealth, and most of them till their own 

 freeholds, upon which they have built comfortable and commodious 

 houses. They return from market with their wains laden with 

 nearly two tons of manure, which their stout and well-fed horses 

 easily draw along a steel-plated track, which has been laid along 

 the Brighton and Point Nepean road for about ten miles. Their 

 work is clone with American digging-ploughs and cultivators, which 

 economise labor and turn it to the best account, while the crops, 

 under the forcing influences of manure and a good rainfall, are 

 refreshing to the eye, with their splendid growth and the hue of 

 livid dark green that betokens the presence of a plethora of plant 

 food. If you travel further arield to the confines of this blooming 

 utilitarian garden land a desolate landscape is seen a forbidding 

 waste of desert sand clotted with stunted ti-tree and heath, which 

 leaves a chilling sense of barrenness and irreclaimable solitude. 

 Yet the desert is part of the same tract as those luxuriant beds of 

 cauliflowers, turnips, potatoes, and onions, which we passed a while 

 ago, changed only by the transmuting energy of the market gardener. 

 Here around Fremantle and Perth there is hardly the germ of the 

 great well-organised, well-equipped enterprise that is directed to 

 the growing of table esculents in the east of Australia and elsewhere. 

 A few Chinese, with spade and hoe but little in advance of the 

 primitive delving tools of Adam's time, occupy some swamp lands and 

 sell their cabbages by weight as carefully as though they were 

 refined gold. But where are the men of English race who 

 are grasping the prize of intense culture and the liberal 

 rewards for it that are so close within their grasp ? Is it not 

 so ? when the market gardener starting in Western Australia 

 can get his land for nothing, as close to Fremantle as South 

 Brighton is to Melbourne, instead of paying at least 20 per 

 acre for it. Is there any exaggeration in saying that big profits 

 are allowed to pass unheeded, when cabbages sell for twopence 

 per pound, and in the other colonies twopence will buy the 

 entire head ? Can the most sceptical say that an acre of the 

 swamp lands on the Jandakot agricultural area that is naturally 

 irrigated, and which the Government will give as a free gift 

 to any man who will crop it, is not more than equal, with 

 similar treatment, to an acre of the Cheltenham sand, whose arid 

 surface in the middle of summer can only be moistened from a tap 



