34 AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 
Forestry in Australia is essentially a Governmental concern. We are in 
the early stages of pioneering, and our first functions, therefore, are to solve 
the silvicultural problems besetting us, and to build up forestry stafis capable 
of establishing effective silvicultural systems. Each State Forest Service must 
have its department of research, its experiment stations, and demonstration 
forests, its nurseries, its administrative headquarters. It must have a staff 
competent to carry on investigations and administer the forests. 
But education and research go hand in hand, and considerable advantages 
flow from the combination. Economy is the first of these, but, further, the 
concentration of these functions at the centre of training would permit also 
of the appointment of a much stronger faculty, and the provision of much 
larger equipment than otherwise would be possible. Moreover, the students 
would have the opportunity of intimacy with Forest Service tasks, and could 
be employed in furthering actual Forest Service work. 
The function of an Australian Forestry School, therefore, should be not 
alone instructive, but also investigative and experimentative. In some 
measure at least, it should be a clearing house for new ideas and systems 
which it is expected to incorporate into forest practice. Its director should 
-be a forest officer in close touch with current Forest Service administration. 
The officers of the Forest Service should be available as special lecturers 
or field instructors. 
The School should be located on a State forest and at the headquarters 
thereof, within easy walking distance of a town, and in the centre of logging 
and milling operations. If possible, it should be associated with a forest 
nursery and experiment station and a demonstration forest and arboretum. 
Its equipment should include a herbarium and museum, forest library, 
research laboratory, log deck and timber collection, a small forest nursery 
and arboretum, drafting and lecture rooms equipped with gas and water, 
workshop and gymnasium and recreation grounds, the most modern surveying 
aud timber cruising instruments, microscopes and cameras, logging and milling 
apparatus, modern furniture (constructed of the lesser-uséd native woods), 
filing cabinets, map files, typewriters and desks, mimeographs (Edison No. 7 6), 
office materials, drafting materials, bushcraft materials, Forest Service books, 
forms, maps, &c. 
In the platforms of both Federal political parties for years past has 
appeared a plank relating to the establishment of a Federal Bureau of 
Forestry. Whether forestry in Australia ever becomes a Commonwealth 
matter or not, it is probable that a forest school and institute of research 
will be needed in each State.* That is the tendency of the day. The Com- 
monwealth, however, holds forest lands in Papua and the Northern Territory, 
which it must place under expert management in course of time. Until the 
population of these Commonwealth areas becomes sufficiently large, it will 
be impracticable to place a forest school within the Territory. In view of 
the identical forest problems of Queensland, the most appropriate arrange. 
a gna be to have the Commonwealth staff trained at the Queensland 
school. 
* 
The training should consist of a three or four years’ undergraduate course 
for cadets, and one or two (three months’) short courses for officers already in 
the services. 
_The term should be one year of forty weeks, with a month’s vacation at 
Christmas, and two months’ field work in the winter or early spring, when 
assessment and nursery work, &c., are in full swing. 
