FIRST CENTURY OF DAIRYING IN NEW SOUTH WALES. 



for dairy purposes, and possessing good constitutions. Like the Jer- 

 sey they are, probably, more adapted to grace the lawn of a gentle- 

 man's villa than to withstand the careless usage of the average Aus- 

 tr; lian herds. Like the Kerry and Alderney, they were by no means 

 unknown to the earjv Australian dairymen. As far back as 1825 these 

 animals had their admirers among the more fashionable of the Aus- 

 tralian residents. A Mr. Ryan, who was Chief Clerk of the Records 

 in Sydney, and a Mr. Garard, a flour-miller in Sydney, took a gre it 

 interest in the Brittany breed of cattle. Both these gentlemen, how- 

 ever, had interests on the Clarence and Richmond Rivers, and, there- 

 fore, turned their attention to the beef breeds ; and whether they sent 

 any of the members of their little black and white bre^d to those 

 Northern Rivers cannot now be ascertained. 



At this stage in the progress of our history my readers may reason- 

 ably ask the question : If these breeds of dairy cattle had been culti- 

 vated to such a high standard of perfection at such an early date, why 

 M-ere they not preserved in the young colony ? My answer is a plain 

 one. When a semi-circle cf. say, iifty miles from Government Hou-e, 

 Sydney, embraced the chief cattle breeding centre of the colony, all 

 the cattle in that area were bred and cared for on exactly the same 

 lin^s as in the older countries. But the laws of Nature, which regu- 

 late all breeds to a common level, and when the survival of the fittest 

 is certainly not the survival of the best dairy quality, we arrive at 

 an age in our early progression when the tender care necessary to 

 promote high qualities in all classes of stock was totally neglected, 

 and the early bushman's usages survived the well-trained husbandmrn 

 In the words of Auld Cuddy, "They a' swealed awa'." Hence the 

 passing of nearly all our early refined breeds of dairy animals to be 

 revived again in more classic times. 



