ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 45 
depends so largely upon the facilities afforded for river and coastal 
traffic that the Parliament cheerfully votes from revenue over 
£100,000 annually for dredging expenses, an amount not exces- 
sive when it is considered that operations have to be carried on 
at twenty-one ports and rivers on a sea-board of six hundred 
miles, extending from the Victorian to the Queensland border. 
Employment is found for about four hundred men on the fourteen 
ladder dredges, nineteen grab bucket machines, seven suction 
dredges, twenty-one tugs, and ninety punts, continuously worked 
by the Harbours and Rivers Department in increasing harbour 
accommodation, deepening river channels, reclaiming land, and 
removing the enormous quantities of silt deposit left by floods. 
The estimated value of the dredging plant exceeds £500,000. 
The application of the centrifugal pump to dredging purposes 
having passed the experimental stage of development, the New 
South Wales Government, in 1888, resolved to cease building 
bucket dredges, and to adopt the pump system. Already six 
powerful suction dredges are at work, with conspicuous success,. 
one at each of the following ports or rivers :—Sydney Harbour, 
Newcastle Harbour, Myall River, Nambucca River, Clarence. 
River, and Tweed River. Two additional machines are nearly 
completed at the Fitzroy Dock. 
Not only has the actual cost of dredging been reduced one-half 
by the adoption, where practicable, of the new system, but (inci- 
dental to the pumping) large areas of valuable land have been 
reclaimed by the material deposited at a cost of 2d. per ton, 
which under the old method of working could only be utilised by 
hand labour at about 8d. per ton, four times the cost of spreading 
it, as now, direct from the pump. 
In crowded harbours, where it is undesirable to impede naviga- 
tion by mooring a pipe-line on pontoons from the suction dredge, 
the ladder dredges have to be used, but by a method first adopted 
in this Colony, the silt instead of being dumped at sea can be 
utilised for reclamation by being deposited alongside a suction 
