68 CONFESSIONS OF A BEACHCOMBER 



restrained and schooled and her response is an abundance 

 of various sorts of food for man. 



The routine that cultivators of the soil have to obey is 

 diverse, but the life of the dweller in the country in tropical 

 Queensland can be asserted with perfect safety to be more 

 comfortable than that of the average settler in any other 

 part of Australia. There are no phases of agricultural 

 enterprise devoid of toil, save perhaps the growing of 

 vanilla, the very poetry of the oldest of pursuits, in which 

 one has to aid and abet in the loves and in the marriage of 

 flowers. But vanilla production is not one of the profitable 

 branches of agriculture here yet. We have to deal only 

 with things that are at present practicable. 



Whether the settler grows maize, or fruit or coffee, or as 

 a collateral exercise of industry gets log timber, or raises 

 pigs or poultry, the life has no great variations. If he 

 farms sugar-cane, being resident within the zone of in- 

 fluence of a mill, he belongs to a different order — an order 

 with which it is not intended to deal. My purpose refers 

 only to men who do not employ labour, who have to depend 

 almost solely upon their own hard hands. The conditions 

 upon which the land is acquired demand personal residence 

 during a period of five years and the erection of permanent 

 improvements, such as fencing, thereon, and there are not 

 many who take up a selection who are in the position to pay 

 wages. The selector must do the clearing, and the pre- 

 paration of the soil for whatever crop in his experience or the 

 experience of others is considered the most remunerative. 

 During this period his love for the particular piece of land 

 by-and-by to become his own begins. More realistically 

 than anyone else he knows the quantity of his energy and 

 enthusiasm, his very life, the land has absorbed. It becomes 

 part of himself even in the early days of toil, and though 

 when in the fulness of time and the completion of condi- 

 tions he may lease the land to Chinese cultivators, and 

 become a resident landlord, he cannot leave the place even 

 for the attraction of town life, for possibly the rent he receives 

 does not make him independent quite. At any rate he 



