4 on 
E.—GEOGRAPHY. 145 
Queensland from opening another tropical area; whereas a railway to 
Adelaide would connect localities in different climatic belts. While the 
only access to Port Darwin from the capital cities of Australia is by a 
voyage of 3,000 or 4,000 miles remote from either of the main steamer 
routes to Australia, the satisfactory development of the Northern Territory 
will be impossible. 
(c) Queensland and the Sugar Industry—Queensland in contrast to the 
Northern Territory has made firm progress ; the population has continued 
to increase ; and though at first coloured labour was introduced, the pro- 
portion of the Asiatic population in 1911 was only 1-47 per cent., and of 
the Polynesian only °29 per cent. 
The numbers of coloured labourers in Queensland were too small 
seriously to affect the population, but they were sufficient to be a constant 
irritant and source of uncertainty in the local labour market. This trouble 
led, in 1900, to the prohibition of indentured coolie labour throughout 
Australia. This decision was supported by the great majority of the 
Queensland people in spite of the most emphatic warnings of disaster. 
Some of the sugar estates are in localities with extreme tropical climates; 
and the Queensland Chambers of Commerce, members of Parliament, 
Farmers’ Associations, and bishops, declared that sugar could not be 
grown by white labour. The difficulty was said to be an absolute physical 
impossibility and not merely economic, so that the stoppage of Kanaka 
labour meant the certain death of the Australian sugar industry. At that 
time the sugar plantations were not prosperous, and exclusion of the 
Kanakas was supported on the ground that so struggling and unprofitable 
a branch of agriculture had better die rather than upset the policy of the 
whole continent. , 
The Bill for the exclusion of the South Sea islanders was therefore 
enacted and the sugar industry left dependent on white labour. In 
spite, however, of the confident predictions of the experts and their friends 
the industry has gone on and been more successful than when run by 
coloured labour. The returns of the industry are irregular. In some 
seasons the yield is good, as in the record year 1917-18, and more land is 
_ planted. An unfavourable planting season reduces the area under cultiva- 
tion and the yields in the second and third years later. Comparisons of 
single years are uncertain; but the following table shows that the areas 
under cane and the quantity of sugar produced have increased greatly 
since the industry became dependent_on white labour. 
5] gave an account of the progress of white labour on the plantations up to 
1908, after a visit to four of the chief sugar-producing districts, in the Nineteenth 
Century, February 1910, pp. 368-380; and in the Proc. R. Phil. Soc., Glasgow, 
vol. xliii, 1912, pp. 182-194. 
1924 L 
