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Australian farmers in their isolation like a mantle of fog, had the 

 effect of making them, paradoxical as it may appear, the most 

 sturdy, independent, self-contained, and, in a manner, prosperous 

 farmers of the Australian group. The Western Australian farmer 

 of the old school is scoffed at freely by newcomers who 

 do not know him, and who do not realise all he has had to 

 go through. There are ample evidences that farming in 

 this colony was, twenty or thirty years ago, and is at 

 the present time, by the same old school, conducted on sounder 

 agronomic principles than it ever has been in the eastern colonies 

 by the average free selector. Land, that in the halcyon days of 

 the east would have been scorned by the selector, has been under 

 crop here for forty years and is still in good heart, thanks to the 

 judicious treatment it has received. The Western Australian farmer 

 is a farmer of the very best type ; his adversities have made him so. 

 In the eastern districts, in the south-west, and in other parts, one 

 can rind farms on which the first sod was turned by the plough 

 nearly half a century ago, that are models of all that a well-con- 

 ducted farm should be. This defence of the Western Australian 

 farmer is made by one who knows them well ; by one who has 

 never hesitated to tell them their shortcomings, and it is made in 

 the interests as well of the new settler for whom this GUIDE is 

 published. The new-comer who wishes to settle on the land will 

 be one of the two classes into which new arrivals may be generally 

 divided. The one class comes spilling over w r ith theory and energy. 

 The man belonging to this class wants to give advice ; not to 

 receive it. He wants to write a book at once and tell everyone in 

 the country how things should be done. His end is premature. 

 To this class the Bureau of Agriculture has nothing to say. The 

 other class, in which we find the man of intelligence, of quiet 

 energy, of perseverance, the man who knows much, and knowing 

 much, realises how little he knows, how much that he has learnt in 

 one country will have to be unlearnt in another, how knowledge 

 is the same all the world over, and yet how variously it has to be 

 applied before it can become power, the man who seeks advice, 

 not scorns it ; this is the man, whose success is almost assured, whom 

 the Bureau of Agriculture welcomes to the shores of Western 



