32 president's address 



extended. We need a strong Forestry Department, whose 

 skilled officers shall be listened to, and their recommendation* 

 carried out. Money spent, freely spent, on the conservation of 

 our forests, will be money well invested. 



Fauna. — The Australian native Fauna is largely unique, and 

 is remarkable for the comparatively small number of destructive 

 vertebrates which, from man's point of view, may be looked upon 

 as pests. The serious enemies to man are the insects, locusts, 

 grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetles and the small fry that destroy 

 the trees, shrubs and herbs. The Marsupials are mostly fur- 

 bearing animals, and their pelts are likely to become increasingly 

 valuable in the markets of the world. Every year millions of 

 Opossum skins and hundreds of thousands of Macropus skins are 

 exported to the Old World at good prices. The farmer and the 

 farmer's wife, the farmer's sons and the farmer's daughters, make 

 pin money by skinning the opossums, literally and in President 

 Roosevelt's sense. These animals . are necessarily becoming 

 greatly reduced in numbers, and in many districts are practically 

 exterminated. The Kangaroos and Wallabies are shot for sport, 

 for their pelts, for their soup-making tails, or because they are 

 rivals of the sheep and cattle. Is Australia prepared to lose 

 altogether its fur-bearing Marsupials 1 I have inquired at times 

 amongst practical men, and find that at present prices it is much 

 more profitable on fairly good land to rear sheep and cattle than 

 to rear Kangaroos and Wallabies. In poor country, rocky and 

 hilly, the comparison is not so unfavourable to the latter. The 

 feasible policy then seems to be to protect the 'Marsupials to 

 such an extent as to prevent extermination on the good grounds, 

 to give them a good chance in poor country, and to set aside 

 areas, the Government on a larger scale as in national parks and 

 reserves, and broad minded landowners, as some are doing, on a 

 smaller scale, in which a stock of Marsupials may be preserved. 

 Then, when prices are favourable, it will be at least possible to- 

 develop on a feasible scale a fur industry which may compare 

 with the ostrich farming which has been found so profitable in 

 Cape Colony. 



