A FOREST POLICY FOR AUSTRALIA. 
forestry. ‘The forest policy, that is the natural sequence of the community’s 
desire to make up for past misdeeds and restore once more the forest heritage 
is naturally very expensive to carry out. The forests may have been so cut 
out that planting has to be resorted to, forest land may have to be purchased 
from the owners who were granted it in the bad old days, and always the sylvi- 
cultural operations to be carried out are expensive. Had only the forest policy 
been inaugurated early in the saw-milling days, then the forest regeneration work 
would have gone hand in hand with the logging operations; the saw-miller would 
bear the cost; the royalty, lease rent or stumpage due, whatever it may 
have been called, would have amply paid for such work, and would 
have left a handsome enough profit for the Treasury. . The industry 
could at that time have been made permanent, and all the horrors of the deserted 
mill townships would have been avoided. Instead, the country only wakes up to 
the fact too late, and the community must of necessity dive deep into its pocket 
if it is to make good the wastage of the past. In many cases the reforestation 
is So expensive a scheme as to give the Government pause, and often it is aban- 
doned, or some sop is thrown to the people in the way of a- nursery 
for raising trees for free distribution, or a law is added to the statute-book 
absolving farmers who plant trees from taxation on the portion of the land they 
have planted. 
Australia’s forest. history has been on the same lines as other English-speaking 
countries. She differs from Canada only in the degree of the destruction she 
has wrought and in the fact that her forest heritage is the smallest of any country 
of her size. In certain parts she has reached such a stage of destruction that she 
has been forced to adopt a forest policy, in others she still continues recklessly 
to destroy. Where the timber area was least of all originally, viz., in South 
Australia, forestry has been longest established. Victoria, with its rapidly- 
growing population and exhausted forests, came next, then New South Wales. 
Queeensland alone would seem to have adopted a policy before the exhaustion of 
her forests—she has only a skeleton Act to help the forest authority; but, in 
spite of this, she has broken away from the groove of the other States by estab- 
lishing the sale by auction of her timber in short saw-milling permits, and by 
abolishing the licence system. Western Australia groans under the burden of 
700,000 acres of timber concessions and leases, and an export trade which means 
the prostitution of some of the finest hardwoods to such a degraded use as 
_ sleepers, and the annual destruction of over 500,000 tons of sound timber at 
the saw-mill fire chutes. Her forests are not yet exhausted, and she has an Act 
which, with the natural termination of the leases and concessions in the near 
future, will enable her to put her forest house in order. Tasmania is still frankly 
destroying her forests; and this is again only. natural, as she is the one State of 
all the Commonwealth group which is primd facie a forest country, and her 
proportion of forest to other land is greatest of all. 
(7'c be concluded.) 
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