58 THE PASTOBAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



the public that " they " gave a value to the swamps 

 of Shoalhaven that no one had expected." When 

 Alexander Berry died, his brother David succeeded 

 to the Fausthke and beneficent task. The work has 

 never since been pretermitted. Under the nominal 

 direction of the subsequent owners, but by the engineer- 

 ing skill and resource of Mr. Morton and his sons, some 

 10,000 acres have been pulled ashore from the sea or 

 lifted up out of the swamps, while 15,000 more on 

 hitherto-barren ridges have been made available for 

 pasturage. The whole estate, at first a sheep-walk, 

 has been converted into rich dairy-lands, where hundreds 

 of small dairy-farms have been carved out, yielding for 

 local consumption and export many thousands of tons 

 of butter yearly. In New South Wales, nay, in all 

 Australia, there is hardly another such example of the 

 conquest of nature by man. 



Alexander Berry did the work of a Faust, but he can 

 have had few of Faust's sins to redeem, save possibly 

 some alleged hardness and miserhness ; and much of 

 the opulence he acquired served to raise out of honour- 

 able impoverishment an ancient Scottish university. 

 He was a man of strong character, cast in a Calvinistio 

 mould. His disposition may be inferred from his 

 account of interviews that he had with two leading 

 members of the Presbytery of Sydney, in connection 

 with some politico-ecclesiastical dispute. One of them 

 he found overflowing with a spirit of Christian forgive- 

 ness, while the other, the famous Dr. Lang, breathed 

 forth charges and recriminations. His sterling quaUtiea 

 were early appreciated by the authorities. He was 

 appointed a member of the Legislative Council, then 

 the solo legislative chamber, at a time (in the late 

 twenties) when there were only three non-official mem- 

 bers ; and he retained his seat after the Council was 

 reformed. Only in 1861 did he finally sever his con- 

 nection with public life. His portrait reveals the 

 Presbyterian elder of the old school, clad in the fine, 

 black broad-cloth of those days and a generation 



