THE KNELL OF THE SQUATTER 341 



or portions of their runs into farms, while others, 

 extending a practice that has for a good many years 

 been used, are opening large areas for share-farmers. 



Yet the process has not been free from tragedy. 

 Many of the squatters have lost their runs through mis- 

 fortune. They could not effect the transformation, 

 because the railway had not yet come near them. 

 Bad seasons, or a fall in the price of wool, or epidemics 

 in their stock, launched them into financial embarrass- 

 ment. The estate fell into the hands of the mortgage 

 companies. The family was broken up and ruined. 

 Now the trains run within half a mile of the station, 

 which is worth £75,000. But it is too late.* 



The knell of the squatter is not necessarily the knell 

 of the pastoral age. Very strangely, the small farmer 

 who was given his farm to place it under crop, says Mr. 

 T. K. Dow, " has been so tempted by the attactiveness 

 of grazing pursuits . , . that wheat-growing has 

 engaged only a small share of his attention." If he 

 acquires agricultural land, says the same authority, 

 "it is to keep stock on an additional piece of land in 

 order to avoid the necessity of putting so much of the 

 farm under cultivation." If he begins by growing 

 wheat, it is in order to gain money enough to launch 

 out into stock-raising. Yet it was to encourage and 

 promote agriculture that facihties were granted for 

 the acquisition of pastoral lands, and Sir John Robert- 

 son declared in 1855 that he derived far more profit 

 from his investments in agriculture than from an 

 " infinitely greater " capital invested in pastoral pursuits. 

 He omitted to add that he had invested most of his 

 pastoralist capital in runs near the Gulf of Carpentaria, 

 which was prematurely settled and had to be in good 

 part abandoned. 



A similar phase has lately been observed in New 



Zealand. There many of the great runs have been 



broken up and cut up into small farms. But it is 



grazing farms that have taken the place of the great 



* Sydney Herald, November 19, 1910,^ 



