COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL. 



"397 



gold, and wheat was then largely imported from Valparaiso and California. The colony 

 of South Australia was the first to take up the running in wheat production. It had 

 shown what it could do by sending prize wheat from its Mount Barker District to the 

 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. The local Government, anxious to bring back its 



A VINEYARD NEAR SINGLETON, NEW SOUTH WALES. 



truant population that had been decoyed to the Victorian gold-fields, established an over- 

 land escort, by which the absentees sent their gains to their wives and children whom 

 they had left behind. Many of them followed, and invested these gains in farms. The 

 Government held weekly land-sales of eighty-acre blocks, and these were eagerly purchased, 

 some by returned diggers, others by capitalists, who leased the land with the right 



